Columbus Road Bridge, Cleveland

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A couple of years ago, I was in Cleveland for a weekend and ended up with a bunch of bridge photos, which slowly trickled out in a long series of blog posts. I thought I was done with those, but it turned out I had a so-so photo of one more bridge, so obviously another blog post was in order. The Columbus Road Bridge isn't the main bridge in the photo above, but the one in the background that you see straight on. It crosses the Cuyahoga at the apex of a bend in the river, right next to the Cleveland Union Terminal bridge, which carries the Rapid Red Line. As I said, the photo isn't that great, but it's still a sort of collector's item. I didn't get close enough to the bridge to notice this, but apparently it was in an advanced state of disrepair, and the county decided to replace it. It sounds like the bridge approaches were kept and renovated, but the lift span itself was demolished and replaced. It's not clear whether this means they also replaced the towers and counterweights, or just the lift span, but in any case the bridge closed for demolition work last May, and the shiny new span was floated down the river and installed this July, just a couple of weeks ago.

A history page notes that the then-current bridge was the fifth at this location. The first was nearly destroyed by angry westside protesters, who feared the new bridge would divert commerce away from the original Center St. Bridge and thus away from the Ohio City area. As the story goes, westside residents boycotted the new bridge, and the city of Cleveland retaliated by demolishing its half of the Center St. Bridge, leaving the Columbus one as literally the only bridge in town. An angry mob showed up to destroy the Columbus bridge, chanting "Two bridges or none", but they were stopped by the mayor of Cleveland and a group of armed militiamen.

An 1857 replacement for the original bridge quickly rotted and collapsed in 1863. An 1870 replacement lasted to 1894, when it was replaced with a double swing span bridge. In this arrangement, the bridge separated in the middle, and the two halves swung off to the side in opposite directions. This lasted until 1939, when it was replaced with a lift span bridge (i.e the one pictured above) as part of a larger project to improve navigation on the river. The lift span lasted much longer than its predecessors, but was poorly maintained beginning in the 1980s, and decayed to a point where it was cheaper to replace it than to attempt repairing it. The 2014 bridge is scheduled to open in October; it's a lift span and is basically similar to its predecessor, but features 5' wide bike lanes as this is apparently a major bike commuting route.

This is actually the second Cleveland bridge that's been replaced since I was there, the other being the Innerbelt Bridge. I'm kind of thinking I may need to go back soon just to keep this blog up to date. By which I mean, enjoy some beer and pierogies, hit the West Side Market again, and keep this blog up to date.

Nickel Plate Road High Level Bridge

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If you happened to be reading this humble blog late last year (and you haven't quite gotten bored of it yet), you might remember me posting a flurry of Cleveland bridge photos. I was there for a weekend back in March 2012, and the posts have sort of been trickling out since then. Count your lucky stars I'm not in the breaking news business.

Anyway, I still have a couple of Cuyahoga River bridges left, believe it or not. Today's installment is yet another railroad bridge, this one for the Norfolk Southern line next to the Innerbelt Bridge (and/or its under-construction replacement). This post took a while took a while to put together because I had trouble figuring out what the bridge is called. You can't get far in this blog business unless you can at least name the thing you're writing about. I do know a few people in Cleveland, and I suppose I could have just asked them, but it feels like kind of a weird and esoteric question, and they'd probably ask me why I'm not writing about the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame like a normal person, and I wouldn't have a good answer for them, and it would be embarrassing. Anyway, I tend to just trust in my Google-fu to eventually come up with the right search terms sooner or later, which is what happened this time.

So according to certain parts of the internet, this is the Nickel Plate Road High Level Bridge. To clarify the name a little, "Nickel Plate Road" was the original railroad that built it, and not the name of a city street, and "High Level" meaning the railroad runs on an elevated trestle above the Flats, unlike many of the other railroad bridges in the area, which are "low level".

As for the strange name of the railroad, I initially assumed -- given the industrial location of the bridge, the piles of gravel, the cargo ships, etcetera -- that the rail line must have served either a local nickel plating plant, or a Superfund site that used to be a nickel plating plant. But that's not the story at all. A railroad page at Cleveland Memory explains that back in the 1880s when the railroad was built, "nickel plated" meant shiny and fancy, and the railroad was intended to be a first class operation, no expenses spared or corners cut. The whole idea with making this a high-level bridge was to give the rail line a level route through the city, without slow uphill and downhill sections. The first bridge at this spot was a swing span bridge that opened in August 1882, as the final link in a line connecting New York and Chicago. That bridge was replaced with the current lift span bridge in 1917, to accommodate larger and heavier trains. In 1957, the lift section was replaced with one with a higher clearance, to allow larger ships to sail upriver from here.

So that's what I know about the bridge. It occurs to me that this is the umpteenth-plus-one railroad bridge I've posted about that's painted a flat black color. And I don't know why. Why black, of all colors? Not because it's chic or slimming, I imagine. Is black paint slightly cheaper? I have no idea. If you know, or have an interesting theory, feel free to leave a comment in the little box below. Thx. Mgmt.

Last

When I visited Cleveland back in March 2012 for a NASA event, I spent most of a day wandering around on foot, mostly taking photos of bridges & cool buildings. I wasn't doing a public art project at the time, but I ran across one that was just too large to ignore. So here are a couple of photos of Last, a huge orange abstract Tony Smith sculpture outside a state office building, a few blocks from Public Square & the Terminal Tower complex. The Smithsonian database entry for Last explains:

A jagged, angular arch formed with six hollow, rhomboidal sections, 6 ft. x 7 ft., bolted together. The sculpture is painted bright orange.
...
Each of the six rhomboidal sections weighs nearly six tons. The sections were bolted together from the inside at five meeting points. The legs are anchored in the massive substructure of the office building. There is an eighteen-inch access hole at the top of the sculpture. Although commissioned by the Ohio Building Authority, the Cleveland Fine Arts Committee helped select the sculpture. It was budgeted at $225,000. The title comes from the artist's decision that this sculpture would be the last arch he would make.

Wikipedia's "List of Tony Smith sculptures" and other sources indicate this really was his final work, although a few of his designs of his have since been fabricated posthumously, one as recently as 2005.

So on one hand it's by a famous and widely acclaimed mid-20th Century sculptor, and I'm always a sucker for geometric abstract art like this. On the other hand, it's only scored one measly Yelp review, and it's a pretty negative one at that. Haters gonna hate, I guess.

Innerbelt Bridge

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Here are a few photos of Cleveland's current Innerbelt Bridge, which carries Interstate 90 over the Cuyahoga River. Oddly enough this isn't the first I-90 bridge that's appeared on this humble blog; a post just a few days ago covered the Vantage Bridge over the Columbia River. Same Interstate 90, just 2,268 miles to the west.

The Innerbelt Bridge only dates to the 1959, but it's currently being replaced. It was well overdue for repairs when the Interstate 35W bridge in Minneaapolis collapsed in 2007, and it turned out that the Innerbelt Bridge was of a similar design. So local officials decided they'd rather just replace the bridge instead of trying to patch up a bridge with basic design flaws.

The replacement project is proceeding rather quickly, it seems; the westbound span of the replacement bridge topped out just last week. The photos in this post were taken in March 2012 (from the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge just downstream) and at the time there were just a few concrete supports in place, so everything else was built between then and now. I can't help but compare this to our recent ill-fated attempt at building a new Interstate 5 bridge here in Portland. It seems entirely possible to me that Cleveland is simply better at building things than we are.

The current bridge replaced the earlier Central Viaduct (1888), which included a swing span over the river until 1912. The swing span was the site of a streetcar disaster in 1895. Under normal circumstances, a safety switch was supposed to prevent streetcars from traveling over the bridge while the span was open. But somehow this switch failed, and a streetcar plummeted off the open bridge into the river on a dark, foggy night, killing nearly everyone on board. The Central Viaduct was closed in 1941 and scrapped for the war effort during World War II.

In any case, for project updates on the new bridge, the Cleveland Plain Dealer (the local newspaper) has an Innerbelt Bridge status page, and the project's Twitter account is updated regularly.

Main Avenue Bridge

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Next up we've got a few photos of Cleveland's Main Avenue Bridge, which carries the Memorial Shoreway freeway over the Cuyahoga River. It's sometimes called the Memorial Shoreway Bridge, and rarely if ever by its offical name, the "Harold H. Burton Memorial Bridge". I didn't walk across this one, or drive across it, or even get that close to it. But it's a really enormous bridge, and it's painted a bright blue color, and it kept showing up off in the distance in my photos, so I figured it was sort of demanding its own post. Info about this bridge can be had at some of the usual sources: HistoricBridges.org & the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History at Case Western Reserve University.

Carter Road Bridge & Railroad Bridge

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Today's installment in The Bridges of Cuyahoga County is a two-fer: The Carter Road Bridge, in Cleveland's Flats district, and an adjacent disused railroad bridge. At this point you might be wondering just how many bridges Cleveland has, since this occasional series has been going on for about a year and a half now. The answer is many, many bridges, and I really only have photos of a few of them, and I've already posted most of those. Once I've worked my way through all of those, I suppose it'll be time for me to go back and take more tourist photos. But maybe not during the winter next time. Lingering around to capture interesting angles and details of these bridges just didn't seem like a really sterling idea, given the cold and wind and impending snow. I just sort of strolled by and snapped a few quick photos on my way back to the Terminal Tower Rapid station, so I could head over to Ohio City to hit the West Side Market and then decide which brewpub to visit.

So, a few tidbits I was able to dig up about the road bridge:

• Bridges & Tunnels has an extensive history piece about this bridge. It notes that this bridge was built in 1939 and is the fourth Carter Road Bridge. The first bridge, built in 1853, collapsed when it was overloaded with cattle.
• HistoricBridges.org gripes that the bridge's central span was replaced at some point, and the replacement uses bolts instead of rivets, which (we're told) lacks historical integrity.
• The bridge's BridgeHunter entry includes the usual collection of geeky bridge facts. As of 2011 the bridge actually had a sufficiency rating of 91 out of 100, which is the highest I've seen in a long time. So that's great, assuming this bridge goes somewhere you want to go.
• Cleveland Memory has a number of historic photos of the bridge.

The abandoned railroad bridge next door was built in 1955 as the "Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and St. Louis Railroad Bridge Number 5" -- the Flats Industrial Railroad Bridge was once the same railroad's Bridge Number 4. This bridge replaced a previous 1902 rail bridge. I can't find a lot of info about it, which is pretty common with railroad bridges, but HistoricBridges.org finds it sort of interesting:

This bridge is interesting because it is of decent length, but the truss span is not a polygonal Warren; it features parallel chords. Its towers do not taper in toward the top either, giving this bridge a boxy appearance. The bridge appears to retain good historic integrity.

So at least it has that going for it, I suppose.

Superior Viaduct

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Today's installment in the occasional series about Cleveland bridges takes us to the Superior Viaduct, the monumental remains of a former bridge. The remaining stone arches suggest the bridge was ancient and served for centuries, but in fact it had a remarkably short life. It opened in 1878 as the city's first high-level bridge, i.e. a bridge that didn't have to open for every passing ship on the Cuyahoga River. The over-water part of the bridge was a swing span, though, because the bridge still wasn't quite high enough to let all ships pass beneath without opening. This turned out to be the bridge's Achilles heel. In 1918 the higher Detroit-Superior Bridge opened and effectively replaced it, and the Superior Viaduct closed to traffic soon afterward. The bridge was condemned in 1920, and demolished by 1923.

The part I haven't gotten a clear idea about is how the arches survived another 90 years after the rest of the bridge was torn out. The viaduct's considered a beautiful historic landmark today, but I imagine that in 1961 or so it would have been seen as an ugly relic and an Obstacle in the Way of Progress, and things tended to get bulldozed back then if they stood in the way of Progress. In any case, here are a few links about the viaduct, with more history and more photos:

• Cleveland Historical
• Cool History of Cleveland
• Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
• Cleveland Memory
• BridgesTunnels.com
• Builders Exchange Magazine
• 'my arranged marriage to cleveland...'

Eagle Avenue Bridge

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The seemingly-endless series of Cleveland bridge photos continues with a few of the Eagle Avenue Bridge, which crosses a bend of the Cuyahoga River near the city's downtown. You might notice something's missing here, namely the Eagle Avenue the bridge is supposed to carry. The road used to be on a raised viaduct as it approached the bridge, but in 2005 the viaduct was judged to be in poor structural condition and was demolished. The bridge itself was abandoned in place, in the open position. As far as I've seen, there are no immediate plans to do anything with the old bridge, but leaving it there lets the city keep its future options open.

Various items about the bridge, from across the interwebs:

• Two photos by Flickr user C Hanchey giving a closer view of the bridge.
• A post at UrbanOhio about the history of the area in the 19th and early 20th centuries, including a curious short-lived device called "Smead's Rolling Road", a sort of escalator for horse-drawn carts.
• Cleveland Magazine published a "How Cleveland Are You?" quiz several years ago. One of the items mentions the Eagle Ave. Bridge in passing; apparently the crazy tight turn in the river here (see the map, above) is known as "Collision Bend". As a non-Clevelander, I only got two points on the quiz. One for knowing that rivers are supposed to flow north (because of the Willamette, though), and one for riding the Rapid to something other than a sporting event, while sober. And on the second point, technically I did stop off and hit a brewpub for lunch, but I feel I deserve that quiz point anyway.
• In 2010 there was some talk of rerouting the river away from Collision Bend, to make room for a proposed casino (!). I'm not sure if that proposal's still in the works or what became of it.
• The bridge's HistoricBridges.org page
• And its Bridgehunter page.

Cleveland Union Terminal Viaduct

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During my weekend trip to Cleveland last year, my hotel was out near the airport, as the main event I'd come for was nearby. I had a free day, so I decided to go downtown and play tourist, and everyone I talked to advised me to ride the RTA Red Line (aka "The Rapid") into town instead of driving. I prefer transit over driving anyway, and being in an unfamiliar city with a chance of snow in the forecast made this an easy decision. So I parked at the Brookpark RTA station, took the train in, got off at the underground Terminal Tower station, and wandered around taking various photos you've seen here already. Just before entering downtown Cleveland, the Red Line crosses the Cuyahoga River on the Cleveland Union Terminal Viaduct, and I ended up with a few photos of said viaduct on my way in and while I was walking around, so yet another bridge blog post was in order. Unfortunately it didn't occur to me at the time that I'd be doing a post about this particular bridge, so the photos aren't that stellar. A few were taken while crossing the bridge, so they're blurry and don't show a lot, and I later realized I had a couple of other photos with the bridge in the background, lurking behind the Flats Industrial Railroad Bridge.

I really haven't been able to dig up a lot of info about this bridge, for some reason. Which is a shame since this post doesn't really succeed on the strength of its photos alone. So here's what I've got:

• Cleveland Memory has several photos better than mine.
• A couple of Flickr photos of it I found are even better.
• A 2011 news story about some repairs to the bridge notes that it was built 1929-1935.
• Cleveland State has a vintage construction photo.
• A railfan site has a photo taken from the unused side of the bridge (it has space for four rail lines but currently carries two). The caption notes that "Standing here, you are trespassing!".

Flats Industrial Railroad Bridge

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More bridge photos from Cleveland, this time of the Flats Industrial Railroad Bridge. Which, unsurprisingly, carries the Flats Industrial Railroad over the Cuyahoga River. Said railroad is a short-line railroad serving industrial customers (ok, one customer, a flour mill) in the Flats district of Cleveland. All in all, the name is about as self-explanatory as you could hope for.

It's always helpful when my interests sort of overlap with railfans, even though I'm not really one of them myself. They tend to be meticulous and take lots of photos, often from angles that wouldn't have occurred to me. So here's a nice photo of the bridge at RailroadHeritage.org, and several more at RailPictures.net.

A photo at Cleveland Memory points out that this was once known as the Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and St. Louis Railroad Bridge Number 4, while one Flickr user points out that this was part of the New York Central system at one point. Another Flickr user has a photoset about the bridge, including a photo of an award plaque from the American Institute of Steel Construction, which gave it an "Annual Award of Merit, Most Beautiful Steel Bridge, Class IV" for the year 1953. If this sort of award sounds vaguely familiar (and it probably doesn't), the Portland area's John McLoughlin Bridge, on the Clackamas River, won a similar award in 1933, but "Class C" instead of "Class IV", and no, I don't know what the difference is there. Someone else has a large photoset with great photos of the Flats area, including a few of this bridge.

Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Bridge #463

As I mentioned recently, I have a bunch of bridge photos from my brief trip to Cleveland last year, and I'm starting to think maybe I ought to post some of them. (By now you may have noticed this isn't really an up to the minute, breaking news sort of blog.) So here are a few photos of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Bridge #463, a former railroad bridge on the Cuyahoga River in downtown Cleveland, just north/downstream of the ginormous Detroit-Superior Bridge. It hasn't functioned as a bridge in quite some time, but apparently it's considered iconic now and they're keeping it around in a permanently raised state. People more pedantic than I (and yes, they exist) might want to argue whether it still counts as a bridge, if it's permanently open and no longer bridges anything. I'm going to punt on that and call it an unanswerable philosophical question, and go ahead with this post on the grounds that I have photos of it, and it sure looked like a bridge when I took these photos. Cleveland Memory quotes the book Bridges of Metropolitan Cleveland about it:

The next movable bridge on the river is known as Bridge No. 3. This bridge is also a B. and O. Railway Bridge. Built in 1956, it is a record-making, jackknife located just north of the Detroit-Superior Viaduct. It replaced a Scherzer rolling lift bridge that had a main span of 161 feet. The present structure has a main trunnion bascule span of 255 feet long and a clear channel distance of about 231 feet. It carries a single track on the 22-foot width of the trusses. There is a vertical clearance of about 23 feet from the top of the track to the bottom of the counterweight when in the lowered position. The substructure consists of two concrete piers with 30-inch steel caissons and 10-inch pipe piles. This bridge is an outstanding example of a single-track, jackknife bascule bridge. In this peculiar type, each rail is supported directly upon the lower chord of the truss. When the bridge is opened, the span pivots around one end. The weight of the bridge is balanced by a weighted lever arm supported by the tower located at the fixed end of the bridge. When in open position he lever arm folds against the upright truss -- hence the name "jackknife". However, J.A.L. Waddell, in his monumental work Bridge Engineering, dubbed this type as a "freak" and dismissed it as "defunct"." (It was first used in 1845 at Manchester, Massachusetts.)

Thanks to the magic of the interwebs, the full text of Waddell's 1916 book is also online. Waddell was no fan of the jackknife bascule design, and described it thusly:

Jack-knife or folding bridges were a freak design that passed out of existence more than a decade ago. Two of them were built in Chicago but they proved to be so light and vibratory and were so continually out of order that they were soon removed. Each half of a jack-knife bridge consists of two steel towers, from the top of which are suspended by tie-rods the two leaves of the floor. These are hinged together at their point of junction, and when the draw is to be opened this point rises, the other ends of the leaves move downward, and each half of the floor assumes the position of an inverted V. In this position a portion of the space between the piers is left free for the passage of vessels; and it was claimed that "the raised floors form effective guard gates." Unfortunately, though, the said guards are badly placed, as there is left in front of each of them a big opening in the floor for animals and vehicles to fall into.

Concerning this type of structure in 1897 the author wrote thus in his "De Pontibus":

"The jack-knife or folding bridge is a type of structure which is not at all likely to become common. There have been only two or three of them built thus far, and they have been often out of order; moreover, considering the size and weight of bridge, the machinery used is powerful and expensive. The load on the machinery while either opening or closing the bridge is far from uniform, and the structure at times almost seems to groan from the hard labor. The characteristic feature of the jack-knife bridge is the folding of the two bascule leaves at mid-length of same when the bridge is opened. The loose-jointedness involved by this detail is by no means conducive to rigidity, nevertheless these structures are stiffer than one would suppose from an examination of the drawings. The Canal Street Bridge, Chicago, is of this type; and its design is illustrated in "Engineering News" of December 14, 1893."

Anyone desirous of learning more concerning this defunct type of movable bridge is referred to "Engineering News", Vol. 25, page 486, and Vol. 30, page 480.

Sadly I haven't found an online archive of century-old Engineering News issues yet, though, so the trail seems to end here. Which is a shame since I'd like to see a description of the design by someone who's not completely dismissive of it. I ought to point out that this bridge was built in 1956, forty years after Waddell declared the design "defunct". So I'm not certain that we can take his opinion as gospel in this case, despite his considerable resume in the bridge business. His firm, Waddell & Harrington, was involved in the aforementioned Detroit-Superior bridge, as well as several here in Oregon: The Interstate Bridge, the Hawthorne, the Steel Bridge, the Sandy River Bridge in Troutdale, and the Union Street Bridge in Salem, among others. They seem to also be behind the OR-99 Columbia Slough bridge, and the 12th Avenue Viaduct over Sullivan's Gulch / I-84 (about which there's a post on the way, sooner or later).

ship & bridges, cuyahoga river

Here are a few more photos from my brief trip to Cleveland last March. I was wandering around the Flats area taking photos of bridges (and I have several bridge posts still in draft that you'll see here sooner or later). I started looking at this large cargo ship tied up across the Cuyahoga River. The river's obviously deep enough for ships this size, but it's also surprisingly narrow and meanders through the city in a series of tight hairpin turns. It looks as if the ship is substantially longer than the river is wide, in fact. So turning around is out of the question, and getting around bends in the river has got to be a serious navigational challenge. I checked YouTube and found a video showing a few minutes of the process: A tugboat is pulling a large freighter upriver, stern first, and we see it essentially yanking the stern sideways to get the ship around a tight bend. Presumably there's another tug at the bow pushing or pulling the other direction. And did I mention there's a lift bridge just upstream of the bend that the ship has to get under? Crazy. I don't know a lot about the tugboat industry, but I have to think this qualifies as playing in the big leagues.

Terminal Tower

Photos of the Terminal Tower building in downtown Cleveland. Opened in 1930, it was the tallest building in the world outside of New York City until 1953, and it remained the tallest in Cleveland until 1991. The "Terminal" part comes from the underground rail station, which served as Cleveland's inter-city rail depot until Amtrak moved in the 1970s. The station still serves as the hub for the local Rapid rail system. The lower floors of the tower are a large shopping center, and the complex also includes a Renaissance hotel and the shiny new Horseshoe Casino (which was still under construction when I was there).

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In many ways it's Cleveland's answer to the Empire State Building. It was the tallest building in town for decades after it was built, and remains a symbol of the city. It has an observation deck near the top, although it's only open intermittently, and was closed the weekend I was in town. And like the Empire State Building, the observation deck here was originally supposed to be a dock for airships, though it doesn't appear to have ever been used for that purpose. My eyes lit up when I read about this, since I tend to go "squee" about anything involving zeppelins, blimps, dirigibles, airships, or what have you. Had it been a practical idea, you would have been able to hop on a zeppelin at the Empire State Building, cruise in swanky 1930s style over to Cleveland, and get off at the Terminal Tower. Then you could take the elevator down to the basement, hop on a train and continue on to your final destination. It makes more sense that something like this would be proposed for Cleveland once you realize that Akron (home to Goodyear and its blimps) is a short distance south of here. Cleveland Memory has a photo of the famous Graf Zeppelin at the airdock in Akron, so there's that, at least.

Anyway, over many years I've slowly come to understand that not everyone cares about zeppelins, so I probably shouldn't end with that. Everybody likes cute animals, right? How about baby peregrine falcons? If so, you may be in luck (depending on when you're actually looking at this post), as the tower has a nesting pair, and a Falcon Cam to monitor them. D'awwww.... (just don't look too closely at what they're eating)

Zero Gravity Research Facility

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A few photos from the Zero Gravity Research Facility at NASA's Glenn Research Center, next to the Cleveland airport. I was there during the NASA tweetup I went to back in March. The name sounds exotic, but the concept is actually pretty simple: There's a 510 foot hole in the ground, lined with steel and sealed, with vacuum pumps to remove all the air. Experiments are enclosed in protective vehicles and dropped from the top of the shaft. The drop vehicle experiences 5.18 seconds of free fall (the zero gravity part) before landing in a pit of foam beads at the bottom.

A datasheet about the facility lists various things it can be used for, like testing new hardware, prototyping experiments that might go to space later, and so on. As it was explained to us, in recent years the facility's been used primarily for testing things you may not want to try on board a space shuttle or space station, like studying how fire behaves in zero gravity. I get the impression this research doesn't fully utilize the facility, and the datasheet mentions possible commercial uses, which I think means it's rentable if you have money and a legitimate use for the facility. If you fit that description, you'll probably want to start by reading the detailed User's Guide (the version online dates to 1999 so the bits about instruments and data handling are probably obsolete, but it still gives a general idea about how the process works.)

The guide mentions that they have a variety of still and video recording options, including high speed video cameras, but none of this video seems to have made it to YouTube, unfortunately. GRC does have its own YouTube channel, although it isn't updated regularly, and they don't seem to have any videos from here or the other unusual & heavy-duty facilities they run. At least not so far.

We were a bit pressed for time and only got to see the facility from the top, which was kind of a shame. The Wikipedia page about the facility includes a photo looking up from the bottom, with a drop vehicle about to hit the foam beads, and another photo on archive.org shows a vehicle as it enters the bead pit. A Cleveland Magazine article visited the bottom of the pit, and the author seemed to be somewhat freaked out about being in such a deep hole.

Center St. Bridge, Cleveland

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Today's adventure takes us back to Cleveland, to the historic Center St. Bridge. I did actually walk across this one and back, on my way to the city's shiny new aquarium. As I've mentioned before, I've always thought swing-span bridges were cool. This one has its central pivot on the west bank of the river rather than in the middle, so as not to obstruct river traffic. Which is important since the Cuyahoga is remarkably narrow given all the shipping traffic it sees. The downside of this is that there's a nice, grassy parklike area on the west bank where the span goes when it pivots out of the way, with a high fence and big signs warning you for god's sake never never go in there, lest you get conked over the head by a bridge. Which would be bad. This seems like reasonable advice to me, really.

Another cool thing about the bridge is that the vastly higher and larger Detroit-Superior Bridge passes directly over it, which makes for some interesting photo opportunities. Which weren't fully exploited this time around as I was busy freezing my fingers off and trying not to drop lenses or lose my phone or that sort of thing.

A few interesting links to pass along about the bridge, mostly of a historical nature:

• HistoricBridges.org
• Cleveland Memory at Cleveland State University.
• A Cleveland Magazine article about historic bridges of the Flats.
• A page about the city's bridges in Case Western Reserve's Encyclopedia of Cleveland.
• Engineering plans for the bridge, also at Case Western Reserve.

Detroit-Superior Bridge, Cleveland

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Here's a Flickr slideshow about Cleveland's Detroit-Superior Bridge, taken back in March of this year. I may have mentioned this before, but Cleveland is a great place to wander around taking photos of bridges. Actually it's a great place, period, and it happens to have a lot of photogenic bridges. Hence the fact that I spent most of a freezing March day wandering around town mostly taking bridge photos.

One cool detail is that the bridge has a lower deck that was once used for streetcars, before the system was abandoned in the 1950s. The city allows occasional public tours of the otherwise unused space. An even cooler thing (if you ask me) would be if someday they brought streetcars back to Cleveland and put the lower deck back in service for its intended purpose.

Cleveland bridges fall into two basic categories, "high level" and "low level". High bridges connect Downtown Cleveland with the Ohio City area on the west bank of the meandering Cuyahoga River. Low bridges connect the mostly-industrial Flats areas immediately on either side of the river. This is a high level bridge, obviously; less obvious from the Google Map is that there's a low level bridge directly beneath this one, the swing-span Center St. Bridge. Which I'm pretty sure I'll do a separate blog post about sooner or later, since I have photos of it and all.

Soldiers & Sailors Monument, Cleveland

A few photos of Cleveland's Soldiers & Sailors Monument, the Civil War memorial in Public Square. Wikipedia's extensive "Ohio in the American Civil War" article should give some idea why the city built such a large and ornate monument.

These were taken on a cold, windy day back in March, but I wanted to post some Cleveland photos today for the city's 216th birthday (216 also being the local area code, you see).

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