The Bridges I Love
WHEN I WAS A LITTLE BOY, THE WINDOW OF MY BEDROOM looked out on New York’s East River, and my view was framed by three of America’s great bridges. Downriver to my right was the awesome Queensboro Bridge; to my left were the Triborough and the Hell Gate. On winter afternoons, the light was cold and clear, as in Charles Sheeler’s paintings. I learned from what I saw through my window of the effect of light and shadow on objects, of architecture and magnificent structures. I contemplated the bridges. They made sense to me. Intuitively I could see how they were built. I saw them carrying cars and trains across the river. The idea of bridging the river never seemed improbable, for the bridges were always there, as surely as the sun rose and set each day. As I grew older, I began to see the bridges in another light: It dawned on me how remarkable it was that mankind should have the ingenuity and the audacity to build such grand things. But at age eight there was no question that a builder of bridges I should be. Unfortunately I never mastered any math beyond the fourth-grade level, so my career as another Roebling or Lindenthai was not to be.
In time we moved away from the river, and it would be almost 30 years before bridges became part of my life again. This time it was with camera in hand. When I came to photograph them, it was an intuitive process that had been learned from all those hours by my window on the river. It led me to point my camera to where the logic would be most clearly revealed.
I have chosen here but a few of the hundreds of bridges I photographed for my book Bridges: The Spans of North America . The Brooklyn Bridge, the Golden Gate, the George Washington, the Mackinac, and other icons of bridge engineering are not included precisely because they are so well known. Rather, I’ve picked some lesser-known examples of the bridge builder’s art, which despite their significance have often been overlooked.
Masonry’s enduring qualities make it in the long run a most economical choice of material, but laying up a bridge stone by stone takes time and skill and capital. America had none of these in its early years, so we didn’t use stone extensively for bridges. Nonetheless we have several historic and beautiful examples. The Thomas Viaduct, in Relay, Maryland, on the western outskirts of Baltimore, is one. A masterpiece of masonry, it was designed by Benjamin Latrobe III for the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. When completed in 1835, it was the most sophisticated bridge in the Western Hemisphere as well as the first multispan masonry railroad bridge in America. The B&O had been chartered eight years before, in 1827, but it was still some 380 miles short of its intended destination on the banks of the Ohio River. Latrobe and the railroad’s directors realized that they would have to find another method of constructing bridges if they were to avoid bankruptcy, so the B&O, like most other railroads forging their lines across the wilderness, quickly turned to wood and eventually iron. All its timber and iron structures disappeared long ago, but the Thomas Viaduct still carries the main line freights of the CSX system without so much as a murmur.
Another masterpiece in masonry is the Starrucca Viaduct in Lanesboro, Pennsylvania. It looks as if it might be more at home in Great Britain, which may be more than coincidental, for the Erie Railroad, which built it, was lavishly financed by British funds. The Starrucca was completed in 1848 and for years carried some of the line’s heaviest freight trains. Today, unlike the Thomas Viaduct, it sees a paltry number of trains.
To take time has never been part of the American approach to doing things. We have always excelled at getting a job done, the emphasis sometimes on the doing even more than on what is finished. One of the outstanding skills of our early bridge builders was their ability to find ways to do a great deal in little time. A vast and bountiful land was ready to be conquered, and the new technology of the Industrial Revolution was waiting to be used. It was almost inevitable that we Yankees should develop the most proficient machinery for doing things faster than people had ever believed possible. It became our stock-in-trade. Immense forests were to be cleared, and cleared they were, first in Maine, then in the vast pineries of Michigan, and when those were gone, we found in the Northwest the greatest lode of all. Wood has been used more extensively by builders in North America than anywhere else.
When one thinks of wooden bridges, the covered bridge always comes to mind. For some reason unknown to me there is a mystique about these that has made them a part of American folklore. In point of fact, covering a bridge was simply a practical way to protect the timber trusswork that carried the load. Far more interesting than the fact that it was covered was the variety of trusses beneath the sheathing. One of the most important was the Howe truss, patented by William Howe, whose nephew Elias Howe invented the sewing machine. By the middle of the nineteenth century the easily and cheaply erected Howe truss had become the standard railroad truss bridge. But the very quality that made it so popular also brought about its downfall—often literally. In 1844 the engineer Thomas Pratt obtained a patent for a far better system, the Pratt truss, which eventually became the ubiquitous American iron-and-steel truss.
Although I have never been an aficionado of covered bridges, I must admit that the three-span covered bridge that carried the St. Johnsbury & Lamoille County Railroad over the Missisquoi River at Swanton, Vermont, was one of the most impressive timber bridges in the United States. Covered railroad bridges were always exceedingly rare, and to my knowledge none are in use today. The Swanton bridge was completed in 1898 and abandoned in 1968. Until it was destroyed by arson in 1990, it claimed to be the longest covered bridge in the United States. Today that honor belongs to the famed Windsor Bridge across the Connecticut River between Windsor, Vermont, and Cornish, New Hampshire. Both employed the Town lattice truss, developed by the architect Ithiel Town, who patented his design in 1820.
By the mid-nineteenth century iron had begun to replace wood for building bridges. However, the age of the iron bridge was the most short-lived of all and was essentially over by the beginning of the twentieth century. This was the era when the truss came into its own as the quintessential American bridge type. Men like Albert Fink, Wendel Bollman, and Squire Whipple were instrumental in developing singular trusses. Whipple and John W. Murphy, chief engineer of the Lehigh Valley Railroad, collaborated on the design of the socalled Whipple-Murphy truss, which was quickly embraced by the railroads, looking for ever-stronger bridges. As the railroads faced increasingly formidable waterways to cross, engineers like Jacob Linville, C. Shaler Smith, and L. F. G. Bouscaren built bridges of hitherto unprecedented size. It is a sad fact that all of America’s magnificent nineteenth-century iron railroad spans are gone. One by one they succumbed, as trains and locomotives became heavier, requiring increasingly stronger bridges. The last to go was the Pecos River Viaduct, near Langtry, Texas, which was replaced just before World War II.
One iron-truss railroad bridge, not on par with those pioneering trusses, has survived. It is the 1887 nine-span lattice truss across the Connecticut River at Northampton, Massachusetts, which has been out of service since the 1980s. It was long assumed to be of steel. But while doing research for the revised edition of Bridges , I discovered that its builder, Richard F. Hawkins, of Springfield, Massachusetts, had never used steel. The bridge is entirely of iron.
The great nineteenth-century iron truss may be gone, but three magnificent suspension bridges with iron-wire cables have achieved the status of national treasures: Roebling’s Delaware Aqueduct (1848), his Cincinnati Bridge across the Ohio River (1867), and Charles Ellet’s Wheeling Suspension Bridge across the Ohio, completed in 1849. These structures have undergone extensive refurbishing, but they remain true masterpieces of the age of iron construction. (Incidentally, the great French bridge engineer Gustav Eiffel mistrusted steel, and all his works, including the Eiffel Tower and the skeleton that holds up the Statue of Liberty, are of iron.)
The age of iron was the era of the ubiquitous patent truss. The fascinating variety of these trusses was one of the things that initially drew me to photographing bridges. In the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries bridge-fabricating companies designed and built thousands of bridges. The larger of them, such as Andrew Carnegie’s Keystone Bridge Company, which eventually became U.S. Steel’s American Bridge Company, the King Iron Bridge Company, the Union Bridge Company, and the Phoenix Bridge Company persevered in the twentieth century and produced some of our greatest steel spans. Myriad smaller companies prospered for a time, and the litany of their names is almost as engaging as the trusses they devised: the Owego Bridge Company, the Horseheads Bridge Company, the Groton Bridge & Manufacturing Company, the Massillon Iron Bridge Company, the Wrought Iron Bridge Company, to name but a few. Among the most influential was the Berlin Iron Bridge Company, which was responsible for perhaps the most interesting truss, the Jarvis-Douglas parabolic truss. Several of these lenticular trusses (they’re lenslike in profile—see the photograph on page 36) survive, including the five-span Aiken Street Bridge over the Merrimack River in Lowell, Massachusetts.
Each of these companies had a particular truss whose virtues it touted to railroad officials and town and county road commissioners, wining and dining these prospective buyers lavishly. The bridges themselves were presented in opulent catalogues and were literally sold by the foot to accommodate the width of any waterway. They often arrived in boxcars, like the pieces of a giant Erector set. A “straw boss” would try to ensure that the men assembling them put all the parts together properly, but many of the thousands of iron trusses came tumbling down soon after they were built. A remarkable number didn’t, though, and a few on little-used byways have survived into the twenty-first century. A perfect example, a little gem built by the Wrought Iron Bridge Company in 1900, is the Rockafellows Mill Road Bridge, across the South Branch of the Raritan River in Raritan Township, Hunterdon County, New Jersey.
Steel made its entry onto the American scene with the completion of two of the greatest engineering triumphs of the nineteenth century: the Eads Bridge, across the Mississippi at St. Louis, completed in 1874, and the Brooklyn Bridge, which opened in 1883 after 14 years of construction. Although steel is pound for pound far stronger than iron and soon became the material of choice, it was at first viewed with skepticism by engineers, though not by Captain Eads or Washington Roebling. They chose steel for the crucial parts of their bridges, the arch ribs of the Eads Bridge and the cables and stiffening trusses of the Brooklyn Bridge. Their decisions to do so are the reason both bridges stand today.
The railroads were responsible for many of America’s greatest steel bridges before the 1930s. The first bridge in America to have all-steel spans was over the Missouri River at Glasgow, Missouri, in 1878 by a little-known engineer named William Sooy Smith. This milestone had always been completely overshadowed by the fact that it happened to be built while the Eads and Brooklyn bridges were under construction.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century the WhippleMurphy was the most frequently used truss. George S. Morison used it for eight immense multispan railroad bridges between 1880 and 1889, seven across the Missouri and one across the Ohio, at Cairo, Illinois. Like most so-called steel bridges of the time, they were built of both steel and iron, the latter in ever-diminishing amounts. Remarkably, the seven Missouri River spans lasted in service for nearly a century. All have been demolished. Morison’s greatest bridge, however, an immense cantilever truss across the Mississippi at Memphis, completed in 1892, is still in service.
The cantilever, essentially a giant bracket extending from both sides of a pier, was used extensively by the railroads where long spans were needed. Without question the greatest cantilever of all time is Benjamin Baker’s Firth of Forth Bridge, in Scotland, which was completed in 1890. The father of the modern cantilever in America was Charles Conrad Schneider, who developed a counterbalanced cantilever whose arms supported a simple suspended span between them. He designed a prototype for this bridge for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1882 and inaugurated the design in 1883 across the Niagara River.
In addition to Morison’s, several other outstanding cantilever bridges from this period have also survived. The greatest of these is the monumental Poughkeepsie Bridge over the Hudson River, which has stood like an ancient ruin ever since it was abandoned in 1974. When completed in 1888, it was one of the major engineering achievements of the century. Another, the Young’s High Bridge, over the gorge of the Kentucky River at Tyrone, Kentucky, is unquestionably the most perfect early steel cantilever bridge in America— and one of the least known. It was built for the Louisville Southern, an obscure little railroad with grandiose designs whose fortunes never materialized. After the Louis- ville Southern was absorbed by larger railroads, traffic dwindled until the final train crossed in November 1985.
Another truly heroic nineteenth-century railroad bridge is the 302-foot-high Kinzua Viaduct. It has stood rusting in a remote part of northwestern Pennsylvania ever since the Erie Railroad abandoned it in 1959, but its future is far happier than that of most unused bridges. The man who was contracted to demolish the viaduct, Nick Kovalchick, was so awed by the structure that rather than scrap it he persuaded the state of Pennsylvania to buy it and turn it into a park.
Like virtually all the important nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century steel-truss railroad bridges, practically every highway bridge of the period has been replaced. A notable exception is the venerable Smithfield Street Bridge, which still carries traffic over the Monongahela in Pittsburgh. This two-span lenticular truss, designed by the great Gustav Lindenthal and opened in 1882, is one of the oldest steel bridges still in service in the world. There was never a plethora of steel arch bridges in the nineteenth century; the outstanding example is the Washington Bridge over the Harlem River in New York, which was opened in 1889. Being in New York, a city with many bridges, the Washington Bridge has always been eclipsed. But it is one of America’s landmark bridges.
The apex of the steel truss came in the first two decades of the twentieth century, the heyday of the railroads. Among the most notable of the many structures of this era were the 1909 Lethbridge Viaduct in Alberta, the longest (5,527 feet) and heaviest steel viaduct ever built; the Metropolis Bridge, over the Ohio River, which until recently claimed the longest simple truss span (with one truss supported by a pier at either end) in the world (720 feet); and the five-span Big Four Bridge (1929), also over the Ohio, at Louisville, which including its approaches is just shy of two miles long. In 1924 one of the most impressive simple truss bridges ever built was completed. The Alfred H. Smith Memorial Bridge strides across the Hudson below Albany, New York. Its two immense Pratt-truss main spans and its spectacular location are, in my opinion, unrivaled. The Huey P. Long Bridge, completed in 1936 across the Mississippi at New Orleans, is, with its 22,996-foot length, the longest steel railroad bridge in North America and one of the last ever built.
Single-span steel arches are fairly numerous in America, but multispans are rare. The most outstanding—and one of the most beautiful steel structures in the world—is the five-span bridge C. A. P. Turner designed for the Soo Line across the St. Croix River near New Richmond, Wisconsin. Completed in 1911, it is perhaps America’s only steel-arch railroad bridge that can be compared to Eiffel’s magnificent iron creations in France and Portugal, yet it remains one of our least appreciated engineering marvels.
The incomparable vintage for steel bridges is 1917, the year of the Metropolis Bridge. Three of the most extraordinary bridges ever were completed that year: the Quebec Bridge, the Hell Gate Bridge, and the Sciotoville Bridge. The making of the Quebec Bridge was a saga of both tragedy and triumph. The first version of the bridge was a testament to bad design and led to the worst disaster in bridge-engineering history. While under construction on the afternoon of August 29, 1907, the south arm of the bridge collapsed onto the banks of the St. Lawrence, carrying some 80 men to their deaths. Seven years later the central span of the redesigned bridge was being raised into position when a jack failed and the span buckled and fell into the St. Lawrence. Eleven men perished then, and not until September 1917 was a duplicate hoisted successfully into place—60 years after a bridge at the site was first proposed. The bridge as completed is one of the most impressive in the world. It still claims to be the longest cantilever span, at 1,800 feet.
The other two monumental bridges of 1917 were both designed by Gustav Lindenthal, one of the most distinguished bridge engineers of all time. The first of these, the Hell Gate Bridge, across New York’s East River at Hell Gate, is by far the better known of the pair. Not only is it one of the longest steel bridges in the world, more than 17,000 feet in all, but the great main span arch, the longest in the world at the time, is composed of the largest steel members ever made. More than 80,000 tons of steel were used in its construction, and it was designed to carry the second-highest combined dead and live loading (the structure’s own weight plus that of what it carries) of any bridge.
As if the Hell Gate were not enough to ensure him a place in the pantheon of bridge engineers, Lindenthal was engaged at the same time by the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad to design the colossal Sciotoville Bridge over the Ohio River. To me the Sciotoville is the consummate American railroad bridge, second only to the Firth of Forth in Scotland as the greatest truss bridge ever. Lindenthal, always the inventor, departed from tradition by employing the more refined Warren truss, instead of the almost universally used Pratt type, and by using rivets throughout. But most daring was his decision to use the continuous truss at all, rather than the cantilever. As with the Hell Gate, everything about the Sciotoville was gargantuan, and it remains the largest riveted truss bridge in America. Designed to carry some of the world’s heaviest freight trains, it has the highest combined dead and live load of any bridge, 78,000 pounds per linear foot.
Not all the massive railroad bridges of the era were of steel. Unquestionably one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken by a railroad was Henry Flagler’s ill-conceived and ill-fated Key West Extension of the Florida East Coast Railway. Reaching over more than 37 miles of islands and open sea, it crossed 17.7 miles of its route with a total of 38 bridges. The greatest of them was the Long Key Viaduct, whose 222 semicircular arches made it the longest concrete arch bridge in the world at the time. After 13 years abuilding, the railroad finally reached Key West in 1912 and was immediately, and rightly, hailed as one of the engineering marvels of the world. But it also proved to be an appalling white elephant for the railroad—and a short-lived one. The line was washed away by the Labor Day hurricane of 1935. The bridges stood, though, and lived to serve another purpose. With the help of federal funding, 108 miles of the line became U.S. Route 1, the first highway across the Keys, which used the old bridges until just recently, when they were bypassed with new ones.
At the same time as construction crews were dealing with daunting semitropical conditions and vast stretches of open water on the Keys, a far more inspired project was under way for the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad. William Hayes Truesdale, the road’s president, transformed the Lackawanna from a winding up-and-down line into what was perhaps the most perfectly built railroad line in America. Truesdale told his engineers to forget tradition, forget the valleys, and forget cost. Build, he said, straight and level across western New Jersey and through the hill-and-dale country between Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Binghamton, New York. The great feature of the two “cutoffs” that resulted was their four concrete viaducts. For sheer monumentality, no other American concrete bridge can compare with the grandest of them, the Tunkhannock Viaduct. It ranks in scale with the Quebec Bridge and Gustav Lindenthal’s masterpieces. It vaults 240 feet over the valley that surrounds Tunkhannock Creek on ten 180-foot-long arches and overwhelms the little town of Nicholson, Pennsylvania, beneath it. Containing an astounding 167,000 cubic yards of concrete, it is as massive as the Lackawanna’s three other viaducts put together and is so huge that it is clearly visible at 37,000 feet from the window of a jet.
We shall not see the likes of these mammoth bridges again. The 1930s witnessed the end of the great days of the railroads. By then America’s infatuation with the automobile had begun to change the shape of everything, including bridges. The suspension bridge, which was not stiff enough for heavy railroad traffic, was ideally suited for roadways. It also could cover distances previously beyond possibility. The thirties saw the completion of masterpieces renowned throughout the world: the George Washington Bridge, the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, and the Golden Gate Bridge. From an engineering and aesthetic point of view, this last is unquestionably a tour de force.
While it may not rank with the Golden Gate, the Mid-Hudson Bridge, which opened in 1930 at Poughkeepsie, New York, is a little masterpiece of suspension-bridge design. It was the work of Ralph Modjeski, one of the most prolific bridge engineers of all time. His long career encompassed two eras of bridge design, beginning with the age of the steel truss and continuing well into the era of the suspension bridge. Perhaps no engineer produced more characteristically American bridges than did Modjeski, for he left his mark on nearly every type of bridge form.
The limelight may have shone on the suspension bridge during the 1930s, but not everywhere. In Oregon the engineer Conde B. McCullough was leaving his legacy in concrete, often in combination with steel. His memorial is the series of bridges on the Roosevelt Highway along Oregon’s Pacific coast. One of the most spectacular of them is the Yaquina Bay Bridge, in Newport, Oregon, in which McCullough ingeniously integrated a steel-arch main span with steel-and-concretedeck approach spans. Concrete has been used extensively in European bridge construction, but until recently its attributes were rarely fully utilized in North America.
The middle of the twentieth century brought radical changes. With most of postwar Germany in shambles, new methods had to be found to rebuild its bridges. The most important of these was the cable-stayed bridge, which uses less steel than conventional bridges and can be constructed faster by using precast concrete sections. A cable-stayed bridge is a continuousdeck girder bridge, of either concrete or steel, with one or two towers from which cables are attached diagonally to the deck to provide additional support. The result is inherently more rigid than a suspension bridge. It can be ideal for medium-span bridges, covering 500 to 2,000 feet. American engineers, conservative, were slow to adopt the design, but lately they’ve moved away from the traditional suspension bridge, except for the longest spans where there is no alternative. Unfortunately, most cable-stayed bridges are, in my estimation, inherently ugly. They lack the grace of the suspension form and the character of the immense railroad truss.
There are two exceptions. The Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which stretches 4.1 miles across Tampa Bay, is considered by some to be the seminal American bridge of the age. Paul Goldberger of The New York Times wrote that “it may well rank as the most impressive piece of large scale bridge design in this country in half a century.” The other, the Clark Bridge over the Mississippi, at Alton, Illinois, is perhaps the most novel cable-stayed bridge in the United States. Its distinctive towers and cabling system give the illusion that it is formed of two gigantic tepees.
The bridges of this millennium already have little in common with those of the previous 200 years. New materials and the computer have enabled us to create spans unlike anything seen heretofore. Bridges of hitherto unprecedented size have already been completed; they include the ones joining island chains in Japan and leaping the eight-mile-wide Northumberland Strait between Prince Edward Island and the Canadian mainland. Others of even greater magnitude are under construction or being contemplated, including one spanning the Strait of Messina between Sicily and mainland Italy.
As remarkable as today’s bridges are, they do not compare, for me, to the inspired creations of artists like the Roeblings, Lindenthal, and Modjeski. These men were pioneers who dared span uncharted waters and push the limits of design. I believe the architect Louis Sullivan put it best when he wrote about the construction of two bridges, the Eads Bridge and the great Kentucky River Bridge, that had kindled his imagination as a young man: “Here was romance, here again was man the great adventurer, daring to think, daring to have faith, daring to do. Here again was to be set forth to view man in power to create beneficently.”
In that sense our new bridges will likely never be as impressive to me as those I saw out my window on the East River.
