The heat breaks, the Parkway closes, and a million-pound train rolls through. Same 72 hours.

The heat finally breaks tomorrow. After a week in the 90s, cooling centers, and feels-like numbers flirting with 100°, a Friday cold front is about to hand the city back to itself — just in time for a weekend with a million-pound steam engine on the Ohio, 400 bands on the North Side, and Paul Skenes taking the PNC mound one last time before the break.

But before you plan a single thing: the road a lot of you drive every day closes Friday night. For 25 days. Read this part first.

Starting 9 p.m. Friday, July 10, PennDOT closes I-376 around the clock (the full Parkway East, both directions) between the Squirrel Hill Tunnel and the Edgewood/Swissvale exit (77). It stays closed until 5 a.m. Monday, August 3. Twenty-five days. No overnight-only mercy.

Here's why: they're replacing the Commercial Street Bridge, and they're doing it the fast way. Crews built a brand-new arched bridge right next to the highway, and over these 25 days they'll slide the whole thing sideways into place. Shut it hard, finish in weeks instead of years.

What it means for your Monday morning:

— Through-traffic gets pushed off at Wilkinsburg (Exit 78B), up Penn and Fifth through Oakland, back on at the Boulevard of the Allies. If you've sat on Fifth in Oakland at 8:15 a.m., you know what that's about to become.

— Detours scatter onto the Turnpike, Route 28, and the side streets of Homestead, Swisshelm Park, Regent Square, and Squirrel Hill.

— Local access to Squirrel Hill and Edgewood stays open, single-lane only.

PennDOT's advice is the honest kind: carpool, shift your hours, take transit, sign up for 511PA alerts, and assume week one is chaos while everyone finds their new route.

I broke this whole thing down in a video when the plan dropped. About half a million of you watched it on Instagram. If it caught you off guard, here's the short version:

Governor Shapiro announced this week that Curtiss-Wright will sink $80 million into expanding its Harmar campus — two new facilities, 150 new jobs over three years, while keeping the 860-plus already there. The plant designs and tests hardware for naval defense and commercial nuclear reactors: quiet, high-skill work that doesn't make headlines until it leaves. The state chipped in about $1.2 million.

The warden of the Allegheny County Jail is leaving after less than two years, taking a job with North Carolina's corrections department to be closer to family. It's a personal decision, and an amicable one. It's also more turnover at the top of a facility that has spent years under scrutiny for conditions and oversight.

Paul Skenes made the National League All-Star team for the third straight year — the first Pirate to do it since Andrew McCutchen strung together five in a row. The catch, and it's very Pirates: he's scheduled to start Sunday's first-half finale against Milwaukee, which likely rules him out of Tuesday's game in Philadelphia. A 6-8 record on a team that can't score behind him tells the rest.

New York developer Midwood has planning approval to replace the old Consumer Fresh Produce warehouse at Railroad and 21st with two buildings, five stories and seven, holding 441 apartments, 23 riverfront townhomes, a garage, and a 37,000-square-foot grocery store on the ground floor.

That grocery line is the one to watch. The Strip has spent a decade filling with residents and famously without a full-size supermarket. You can buy hand-pulled mozzarella and a $14 olive oil at noon and still have nowhere to grab a gallon of milk at 9 p.m. Midwood says it's in talks with grocers but hasn't signed one.

Somewhere in America, people race 60-year-old Ferraris down a public park road past hay bales. It's here. It's the only place.

The Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix is the only vintage auto race in the country still run on actual city streets — no purpose-built track, no runoff, just Schenley Park's Serpentine Drive turned into a 2.33-mile, 22-turn circuit lined with hay bales, stone walls, telephone poles, and the occasional manhole cover. Drivers in priceless prewar and midcentury cars thread it at speed, in front of a park full of people eating funnel cake.

It started in 1983 as one guy's idea that Schenley's roads looked like a racecourse. In its 44th year, it draws 100,000 spectators and has quietly raised more than $7 million for autism and disability services. This year the course gets its full self back: the Panther Hollow Bridge reopens, so racers cross it again for the first time in years, and the start/finish line returns to Phipps, right where it sat in 1983.

Race weekend is July 18–19 — next weekend, not this one. Mark it. There's nowhere else in the country you can watch this, and it's free.

2682 Oak Hill is blended into nature.

It's a contemporary build, and there's so much more to see behind this one photo. By now you know the rule around here: I only show you a house when it's for sale and there's something genuinely interesting about it. This one clears the bar.

Bright, warm textures throughout, but unmistakably contemporary. A reader's-dream library with bookshelves climbing floor to ceiling. A massive floor plan, a private driveway, and a full wooded acre where you can't see a single neighbor — beautifully landscaped on every side. And it sits in one of the region's top school districts, up in Hampton Township.

It's the kind of house that doesn't photograph its best — you have to walk it.

Listed by Linda Honeywill, Berkshire Hathaway The Preferred Realty.

👉 See the full listing

Q: Union Pacific built 25 of the giant "Big Boy" steam locomotives in the 1940s. How many are still operational today?

A: Exactly one — No. 4014, the very engine rolling through Pittsburgh on Saturday. The rest are static museum pieces. You're not just seeing a big train this weekend; you're seeing the only one of its kind still running on Earth.

— The heat, officially. The heat wave that's been cooking the region since the Fourth kept cooling centers open at five HAL senior centers, 8 a.m.–7 p.m. It finally breaks Friday.

— A pollution fight worth tracking. Three Rivers Waterkeeper has notified Neville Chemical it intends to sue over nearly 9,500 self-reported water-pollution violations since 2021 on the Ohio — benzene, oil, grease.

— Vision Zero, for real this time. Allegheny County launched a plan to fund a crash study so PennDOT can redesign the roads where people keep dying.

Three Pittsburgh stories worth a click that didn't make the cut above:

— The Rachel Carson EcoVillage is finally opening. After five tumultuous years, residents are moving into Southwestern PA's first cohousing community, up in McCandless by La Roche.

— Anthrocon's 20th drew 16,100 downtown — even after the heat forced the fursuit parade to cancel.

— The heat kept ERs and first responders slammed over the long holiday weekend.