Nellie Bly to join Franco, George at airport
Statue honors ‘one of the first crusaders’ for women, children and those with mental illness
Investigative journalist and world traveler Nellie Bly will join Steelers legend Franco Harris and Founding Father George Washington in greeting travelers at Pittsburgh International Airport.
Bly was “one of the first crusaders” for women, children and those with mental illness, said Anne Madarasz, chief historian at the Senator John Heinz History Center.
The airport monument will call attention to her story.
The history center and Allegheny County Airport Authority will install the lifelike figure later this month, coinciding with National Women’s History Month and the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.
She’ll wear her traveling coat and hat — honoring her famous trip that became the book “Around the World in Seventy-Two Days” — and hold the small suitcase that carried her belongings around the globe.
Bly was born Elizabeth Jane Cochran near what is Burrell in Armstrong County. She began her career in journalism as a teenager. She adopted the pen name Nellie Bly after the Stephen Foster song “Nelly Bly” during a brief stint reporting for the Pittsburgh Dispatch in 1885.
Financial trouble forced her to leave what is now Indiana University of Pennsylvania when her father died, so she moved to New York to become a reporter.
Bly went undercover as a patient at the Blackwell’s Island Asylum while writing for the New York World and penned a series of stories about her experience. The gig made her famous and marked a new era of investigative journalism, according to a press release on the statue’s installation.
In her famous trip around the world, Bly used steamer ships and trains to get from New York and back in just over 72 days. The time beat the fictional record set by novelist Jules Verne’s character Phileas Fogg in “Around the World in Eighty Days.”
Ms. Madarasz said Bly spent her life proving that “a woman could do anything a man could do, and do it better.”
When her husband, Robert Seaman, died in 1904, Bly tried her hand at business ownership, taking over his company, Iron Clad Manufacturing.
She didn’t stop there. She came back from retirement during World War I and became one of the first female war correspondents in the U.S.
The airport is “pleased to recognize Nellie Bly’s important historical accomplishments … as part of our arts and culture program at Pittsburgh International Airport,” said Airport Authority CEO Christina Cassotis in a press release.
In addition to the figure, a history center initiative, “Women Forging the Way,” will celebrate Women’s History Month. The initiative will honor women who have made history — through public programs, displays and digital stories.
The first will be an event Thursday titled “Sophie: The Incomparable Mayor Masloff,” which will introduce Barbara S. Burstin’s recently released biography of the same name. The event is free and will take place from 6 to 8 p.m. at the Heinz History Center in the Strip District.