Spring Street Bridge

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The Spring St. Bridge barely merits a post here. It's a little pedestrian bridge over a ravine up in the West Hills. It connects two dead-end streets, and I'm sure it only exists so that kids can walk to Ainsworth School, on SW Spring St. You can't even see the bridge on the Google map above, so just trust me that it's in the forested bit in the center.

I only bothered doing a post because of a rather embarrassing detail. The bridge is just down the block from Jewett Park. I've been there a couple of times and never noticed this was just down the street. I had no idea it was here until I saw it on Structurae and Bridgehunter. So much for my quasi-legendary powers of observation. Sheesh.

Although, in my defense, I wasn't really looking for bridges at that point. I suppose that's always a risk with single-mindedness, isn't it?

The bridge does show up in the city's bridge inventory, which tells us that it was built in 1938, it's made of wood (duh), and could maybe use a seismic upgrade someday. Which probably follows directly from being old and made of wood.

Next door to the bridge there's a little mini park area I also didn't notice. It seems that the land belongs to the school district, and the school has an "Environmental Club" devoted to maintaining it. Which is one of those nice perk programs you get to have when you're a school in the nice part of town, I guess. They call the place "Ainsworth Greenspace", which sounded oddly familiar to me, although I didn't immediately realize why. Turns out that the place suffers from a rather improbable naming collision. There's another tiny "Ainsworth Greenspace" up in North Portland, next to the MAX line, which plays host to a sculpture called "River Spirits". That Ainsworth is named after the street it's on. This one is named after the school it's next to, while the North Portland Ainsworth is next to an entirely different school. Both the street and the school are named for the same guy, a certain Captain John C. Ainsworth, as is Ainsworth State Park out in the Columbia Gorge. Oh, and let's not forget the Ainsworth Blocks, on NE Ainsworth St. in NE Portland (as opposed to N Portland, where one of the Ainsworth Greenspaces is at). And CafeUnknown has a post about Portland's late, lamented Ainsworth Building.

So now you know. And, in the immortal words of G.I. Joe, knowing is half the battle.