Nellie Bly figure to be installed at Pittsburgh International Airport
As the nation celebrates National Women’s History Month and the 100th anniversary women’s suffrage, the Senator John Heinz History Center is partnering with Allegheny County Airport Authority to install a new lifelike figure at Pittsburgh International Airport.
Nellie Bly will become the third historic figure on display in the terminal, joining Pittsburgh Steelers legend Franco Harris and George Washington.
Born as Elizabeth Jane Cochran near present-day Burrell Township in Armstrong County, she began a career in journalism as a teenager. While a reporter for the Pittsburgh Dispatch, she took “Nellie Bly” as her pen name.
Bly rose to fame as a reporter for the New York World, when she went undercover as a patient at Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum and pioneered a new era of investigative journalism. A series of stories, which later became a book, documented her shocking experience in the asylum.
Bly’s figure is expected to be installed in the airport’s Airside Terminal later in March.