BNSF Columbia Slough Bridge

View Larger Map

The next Columbia Slough bridge on the agenda is the one carrying the BNSF railroad. This is the same rail line that crosses the Columbia on the Vancouver & Oregon Slough railroad bridges, and continues on through the Portsmouth Cut (beneath a set of railroad-owned road bridges), and then across the Willamette on Bridge 5.1. Like all of the aforementioned bridges, the one over the slough was designed by Ralph Modjeski (who also designed downtown Portland's Broadway Bridge).

This is the smallest and undoubtedly the least interesting of the BNSF Modjeski bridges. Frankly there's nothing interesting about it other than who designed it, and it's hard to imagine that he actually spent a lot of time on this one. There wasn't even anything in the Oregonian database about it, as far as I can tell. But one of the constant guiding principles at this humble blog is that some things are worth doing just for the sake of completeness, and this bridge completes the set of Portland Modjeski bridges. As far as I know. One upside of this sake-of-completeness thing is that I end up having a top search ranking for all sorts of curious and obscure things. Which would be great, if anyone was ever bored enough to actually Google them.

Columbia Boulevard Bridge

The final stop on our tour of Portsmouth Cut bridges is the one on Columbia Boulevard. It's the northernmost of the four, borders an industrial area, and carries a lot of commercial truck traffic. It seems to be in better shape than the others (at least from the standpoint of a non-civil-engineer walking across it), and it was widened to four lanes at some point. Its entry in a city bridge inventory says bridge 078 dates to 1909 and 078A dates to 1968, so I imagine that's when the widening happened. I couldn't find any news stories in the Oregonian database about that project to confirm that. I suppose it didn't merit one, as an unattractive bridge in an industrial area, bordering what was then an impoverished neighborhood. Ok, that or the database's search feature is a little substandard and misses stuff you're looking for, which wouldn't be the first time I've run into that. It also does't have Bridgehunter or Structurae pages, only an UglyBridges.com entry. That's usually a sign this whole bridge thing has gone a bit far down the rabbit hole.

This is probably a good time to point out that this entire bridge project got started because I got the notion to walk across the Morrison Bridge, back before they added the nice walkway it has now, and I realized I'd never done that before, and I thought it would be interesting to do the other Willamette bridges too and take some photos in the process, and it's sort of taken on a life of its own since then. To be honest, a lot of the motivation behind this, as well as the public art and city park things (which have long since gone down rabbit holes of their own), is that I don't travel as much as I'd like to, and I have to go to somewhat absurd lengths to continue playing tourist without leaving town. I keep thinking I'm bound to run out of material for these projects sooner or later and I'll have to go find a different silly hobby. Hasn't happened yet, though.

Fessenden Street Bridge

The third Portsmouth Cut bridge on our tour carries N. Fessenden St. over the ravine. It's about the same style as the others; same age, same designer, same disrepair. It's got the usual Bridgehunter, Structurae and UglyBridges.com pages, where we learn things like:

History
     Built 1909
Builder
     - Ralph Modjeski of Bochnia, Poland (Engineer)
Design
     Warren deck truss
Dimensions
     Length of largest span: 89.9 ft.
     Total length: 164.1 ft.
     Deck width: 40.0 ft.
...
Inspection (as of 07/2012)
     Deck condition rating: Poor (4 out of 9)
     Superstructure condition rating: Poor (4 out of 9)
     Substructure condition rating: Satisfactory (6 out of 9)
     Appraisal: Structurally deficient
     Sufficiency rating: 49.7 (out of 100)
Average daily traffic (as of 2010)
     4,931

I don't know if anyone particularly cares about bridge trivia sites, but those are often the only sources of information when a bridge isn't particularly attractive or significant. That's certainly the case here. Fessenden is not a major arterial street, or at least it's not intended to be. As one of only four streets that cross the Cut, and only six connecting St. Johns to the outside world (the others being Marine Drive much further north, and the St. Johns Bridge), it's gotten a share of truck traffic heading for the Rivergate industrial district or the St. Johns Bridge. Complaints by residents prompted the city to encourage trucks to use Columbia Blvd. instead, or else. The Columbia Blvd. route is apparently two miles longer and burns an extra 15 minutes of driver time, so I suspect compliance will be a bit spotty when nobody's looking.

The Cut bridges have a less visible role carrying utilities; the Willamette Boulevard bridge has what looks like a water main on its underside, and this bridge carries a natural gas pipeline. I suppose that would be an argument for not letting these bridges completely fall to pieces.

apparently there's a natural gas pipeline here

Lombard Street Bridge

Our tour of Portsmouth Cut bridges continues with the Lombard. St. Bridge, the next one north from the Willamette Boulevard bridge. It's a similar deck truss design and has the usual Bridgehunter and UglyBridges.com pages, for your bridge-geekery needs (if you have bridge-geekery needs). The city's 2002 St. Johns/Lombard Plan calls out this bridge (but not the others) as having high historical significance. The brief blurb about it just describes its construction and doesn't explain what's so special about it. The Portsmouth Cut itself only managed rank III, though it merited a longer description:

Railroad Cut 6929 N. Carey Boulevard The Portsmouth Cut is an approximately 6,600 foot long cut in the bluffs at St. Johns through which run two mainline and auxiliary railroad track.
Significance: Transportation. The railroad bridges, cuts, and tunnels of North Portland, all built circa 1907, were the result of competition between the principals of two major railroads: James J. Hill (Great Northern,Northern Pacific, and Spokane, Portland, and Seattle (SPSRR)) and E. H. Harriman (Union Pacific and Southern Pacific). The Great Northern did not have direct access to Portland, leading Hill to build the SPSRR to provide independent access to Portland. He built the bridge over the Willamette River, the cut through the North Portland Peninsula, and the steel bridges over the Oregon Slough and the Columbia River. On the other hand, Harriman wanted direct access to Seattle for his Union Pacific line, which passed through Portland. Around 1910, the railroads settled their differences and the Union Pacific built a tunnel through the peninsula to connect with the SPSRR at what is now called North Portland Junction.

The Lombard St. bridge has the same messy ownership & maintenance situation as the Willamette Blvd. bridge, and it seems to be in more or less the same state of repair. There's an added twist here in that Lombard doubles as US 30, an Oregon state highway, so the state transportation department is responsible for the road. The state's role regarding this bridge (if it has one) is unclear; at any rate they don't appear to have any more leverage over the railroad than the city does.

For a bridge the city thinks is an iconic landmark, I can't find much in the way of interesting links to share about it. What's more, a lot of the search results that do come up (like this city trail alignment plan) refer to an entirely different bridge, which carries Lombard over the Columbia Slough up near Kelley Point Park.

I did find an account of a 2012 protest on the bridge, in which environmental activists campaigned against coal trains running through the Portsmouth Cut. That's obviously a concern, since the cut borders residential neighborhoods on both sides. But as dirty and flammable as coal trains are, the latest controversy involves oil trains. The current North Dakota oil boom came with an infrastructure problem, in that there was no existing pipeline to get the oil out of North Dakota, and building a new one would be expensive and involve a great deal of bureaucracy and controversy. So instead the oil companies quietly began shipping oil by rail, and they aggressively lobbied state governments to keep all information about the trains private and confidential. I suppose they figured that in the wake of the Lac-Mégantic oil train disaster, running hundreds of oil tank cars through residential neighborhoods might be a tad... controversial. Some of the North Dakota oil is destined for export -- yes, the USA is actually exporting oil now -- and this oil travels by rail to an export terminal at Port Westward, OR, near Clatskanie. I didn't realize there even was an oil export terminal there; it turns out that it used to be an ethanol plant, built with public subsidies no less, and they're somehow reusing the environmental permits the plant received when it made ethanol. The route to Clatskanie takes oil trains right through the Portsmouth Cut, as many as three trains per week. The Oregonian dug this up in a rare (for them) bit of investigative journalism, despite the state's effort to shroud the whole business in total secrecy. This may seem surprising in a state with such a liberal, tree-hugging reputation, but in general the state government (and DEQ in particular) have always sided with corporations over public health and safety, at least when they think nobody's looking.

Willamette Boulevard Bridge

The ongoing bridge project takes us back to North Portland, for a different sort of bridge. You might recall an earlier series I did on railroad bridges in North Portland: The Burlington Northern railroad crosses the Columbia River on the Vancouver Railroad Bridge (and the smaller Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge), and crosses the Willamette on a bridge sometimes known as "Bridge 5.1" (meaning 5.1 miles from downtown Portland). In between, as it crosses the peninsula between the Columbia and Willamette, the railroad runs much of the way in the Portsmouth Cut, a wide man-made ravine up to 100' deep, since railroads like to avoid grade changes if possible. The cut forms a sort of artificial canyon between St. Johns and the rest of North Portland, and this gap is crossed by just four bridges, at Columbia Boulevard, Fessenden St., Lombard St., and Willamette Boulevard. We'll be visiting all four eventually, but our destination right now is the Willamette Boulevard Bridge. It has the usual Bridgehunter, Structuræ & UglyBridges.com pages, if you're interested in bridge-geek stuff; Warren deck truss bridges are not really the most visually exciting things out there, but this and some of the other Portsmouth Cut bridges were designed by Ralph Modjeski, a well-known bridge engineer who also created the aforementioned BNSF railroad bridges as well as Portland's Broadway Bridge. So at least there's a little historical significance here.

In a number of the slides you'll notice this bridge looks a bit... worse for wear. In 2007, the Oregonian sounded an alarm about this bridge, titling their article "10,000 cars a day on rusting hulk". This was the same bout of handwringing over sufficiency ratings that got us a new Sellwood Bridge (now under construction), but nothing's happened here so far. The Sellwood rated a lowly 2 out of 100, while the Willamette Blvd. bridge scored a 47. The fine print, though, indicated that the Sellwood rated so poorly due to carrying far more traffic than it was designed to handle, and was actually in better structural shape than the bridge you see here.

You might wonder how the city let it get so shabby, and why they haven't fixed it. It turns out that fixing it is not the city's job, or the state's job for that matter. Back in 1906 when the railroad line went in, the railroad needed a franchise from the city in order to dig the cut and run the rail line through it. The city noted that the dig would cut through 18 city streets, leaving St. Johns effectively an island. Some degree of haggling went on, and the resulting city ordinance required the railroad to build and maintain up to four bridges over the rail line. That arrangement continues today, and legally the bridges are the railroad's problem. They're not exactly revenue-generating assets, though, and they seem to be prioritized accordingly.

In October 1906, Mayor Harry Lane vetoed the proposal as not serving the city's interests. The four bridges had already been negotiated, but the proposed permanent franchise had no provision requiring the railroad to replace the bridges when they inevitably wore out. The 2007 Oregonian story indicated that the city council overrode Lane's veto. I can't find an archived news story about that, but I assume it must have happened that way since the Portsmouth Cut obviously exists. Here's a big excerpt of Lane's veto message, since I like his writing style:

There is no time limit placed upon this franchise, and the failure to set such a limit upon the life of its franchise is now claimed by the holders of the Fourth-street franchise to make it last forever, which, I here may remark, is an exceedingly long time.

I can see no harm in a franchise granted to last forever if at the same time it contains a provision allowing the people to recall it at any time such grounds of complaint against its further existence as would hold in a just court of law. There is no such provision in this ordinance.

No promise is made to build any new bridges when these wear out, and inasmuch as the franchise is for a cut 100 feet deep and two hundred feet wide, to last forever (if it does last that long), for that same length of time people are going to require bridges to cross the chasm, and for exactly as long as the chasm lasts, so long should bridges be provided.

Presume that lightning destroyed one or more of these bridges, or that some miscreant destroyed one or more of them with dynamite. From that day forth, so far as this franchise is concerned, they would go unbridged or the city would be compelled to build them at its own expense.

As there are 18 streets crossed by this deep cut, and steel bridges of the required type now cost, say $60,000 each, you must allow that it would prove quite expensive. I think that more specific terms should be used in regard to this matter.

In the near future many people will dwell and do business upon the peninsula, and it is within the bounds of reason to suppose that some day some other railway company will wish to enter the city there or thereabouts, and if so another 100-feet deep gash with more bridges would be necessary before it could do so. I think it not unreasonable to require that a common user clause on terms just to all be included in the franchise.

Construction was already underway in December 1906. They used much the same technology as was used to dig the Panama Canal: Steam shovels from the Columbia end of the cut, and hydraulic mining on the Willamette side. Hydraulic mining (which was also employed during the California gold rush) uses high pressure water jets to erode and wash away the land you'd like to be rid of. It's a highly efficient way of digging large holes quickly, so long as you don't really care where all the silt ends up. The Oregonian article about the dig claimed that tailings would be used to fill in low-lying areas around the Willamette River bridge, but I suspect most of the dirt just ended up in the river.

The next year, Lane also vetoed an ordinance authorizing a railroad tunnel under North Portland, on similar "perpetual franchise" grounds. As he'd predicted the year before, a second railroad needed a route through North Portland, and would be unable to use the Portsmouth Cut because the city hadn't insisted on a "common use clause" during the previous negotiations. The tunnel proposal claimed to have a common use provision, but Lane wasn't sold and saw a crucial loophole in the proposal. It's not clear to me sure whether this second veto was overridden as well, but tunnel was eventually built, and today connects Swan Island to industrial North Portland, traveling directly under N. Dana Avenue. In any case, Lane's veto message this time around had a distinct tone of I-told-you-so:

This franchise or grant has a common user clause which allows other railroad companies to use the tunnel upon payment of a just proportion of the cost of the same, but nowhere provides any right of access or egress to said tunnel. In other words, any other railroad company, upon payment of its proportion of the cost of the same, can use the tunnel, providing it can conjure up some means of getting into it, or out of it, which quite naturally it could not do unless it in some way secured a right to use the approaches to such tunnel, which is the right, in my opinion, that should be insisted upon by the representatives of the city before the grant is made.

Also, there is no time limit set upon the life of the grant so far as I can ascertain, it being a perpetual franchise with no restriction, of which grants this city has had experience in the past, and is now having.

The city's interests demand that as few bridges, tunnels and cuts through, over and under its property be made as possible, and in the event that another railroad should come to the city, ordinary foresight suggests that the provisions for the same be made as soon as possible. If the city, through its agents, had taken such a view of the matter when the deep cut across the Peninsula, now in process of construction, was suggested, it would not have been necessary to deface that section of the city with the deep gash which is both destructive to its beauty and its usefulness, nor would the present grant have been asked for.

Also it would have rendered it unnecessary to construct the bridge across the Willamette River, which is now being erected, and which, when completed, will forever be a bar to navigation and add to the cost of every shipment from this port in the future, to the detriment of the community.

The interests of the people are greater than are those of any corporation, and however much any particular company may have suffered at the hands of a most astute or canny rival, in its efforts to secure terminal facilities, the fact remains that we are but the agents of the people, and our duty is to them alone and to none other.

The ownership and maintenance situation apparently remains unchanged to this day. I ran across a 1986 incident in which a city water main broke and washed out two supports for the Willamette Blvd. bridge. The city and railroad fought over who had to pay for repairs. Reports at the time explained that the city technically owned the bridge, but the railroad was on the hook for maintaining it. The railroad argued that since the root cause was a faulty city-owned water main, the city ought to pay for repairs instead. This went on for a while and the bridge remained closed while the sides haggled. In the end, the city ended up footing the bill. Presumably they felt a bit more urgency about getting the bridge reopened than the railroad did. With a historical precedent like that, from the railroad's standpoint it's reasonable to assume that if the bridge gets bad enough, someday the city will either foot the repair bill again, or take it off their hands (and balance sheet) entirely.

Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge

[View Larger Map]

As you might already know, a few years ago I sort of stumbled into a bridge project for this humble blog. It started out with the Morrison Bridge, then a couple of others, then I figured I'd go ahead and do all the Willamette River bridges in town. Then I decided to do Columbia River bridges, and somehow ended up doing Clackamas and Sandy River ones too. And now... I guess I'm not really sure what the scope of this thing is anymore. There have been a few trailing items out there, trailing because I haven't been able to get quality photos of them. With the Clackamas River Railroad Bridge, I finally threw up my hands and figured I'd just go with the subpar photos I had, and try to make up for that with a little extra history work. The Lewis & Clark Bridge at Longview is likely to get a similar treatment. I have exactly one blurry photo of it, but it's a long way to go just to take more bridge photos.

And then there's the subject of today's post, the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge (aka BNSF Bridge 8.8) between Hayden Island and the south bank of the Columbia. The Vancouver Railroad Bridge carries trains the rest of the way, between Hayden Island and the Washington side of the river. It's similar to what the obscure North Portland Harbor Bridge is to the Interstate Bridge. The cool thing about it is that (like its Vancouver sibling) it's a swing span bridge, where part of the bridge pivots out of the way instead of raising when ships need to pass. Ok, I'm probably stretching the word "cool" to the breaking point here, but hey, I kind of specialize in that. Bridge 5.1 on the Willamette is on the same railroad line, and it used to be a swing span too until it was replaced in the 1980s.

I don't imagine this bridge has to open very often; there are a handful of commercial shipping businesses of some sort along the south side of the channel, but most of the channel is just houseboats. Still, I saw at least two people at the bridge's operator booth, possibly for a shift change. So I suppose it's always ready and able to open if the need arises, once in a blue moon. If you're ever doing pub trivia and they ask you to name all the Portland bridges that open, this is the bridge that will win you the contest, assuming you have a good trivia master. The others are, on the Willamette, doing downstream: Hawthorne, Morrison, Burnside, Steel, Broadway, and BNSF Bridge 5.1. Then on the Columbia, it's the Interstate, the Vancouver Railroad Bridge, and this one here. That's the whole list. Feel free to split your winnings with me, or at least leave a comment and say thanks, if you'd be so kind as to do that.

I've had a todo item for this bridge for quite a while. I drove by the bridge a several times but never could find anywhere to park. I had a couple of photos from the North Portland Harbor Bridge showing it way off in the distance, and I almost just went with those. Then I realized there was a segment of the Marine Drive Trail atop the levee from the Expo Center to the bridge, so I could just ride the MAX Yellow Line to the end and walk the rest of the way. This worked pretty well, and I got a bonus look at that weird bit of trail. It doesn't look like it gets a lot of use. I saw one other person there, and he was practically a speck off in the distance. He kept looking back, I guess to make sure I wasn't going to mug him or something. Then it started raining heavily. It could be my imagination, but the guy way up ahead seemed to relax when he realized I had an umbrella and wasn't just trudging along in a hoodie, like the umbrella was a badge of respectability and non-threatening-ness or something. I'm not sure how that works, to be honest.

broadway bridge, 8mm

broadway bridge, april 2011

Vancouver Railroad Bridge

View Larger Map

A few photos of the Vancouver Railroad Bridge on the Columbia River, also known as Burlington Northern Bridge 9.6. Which, maybe not surprisingly, is on the same rail line as BNSF Bridge 5.1 over the Willamette.

Ever since I was a kid, I always thought swing-span bridges like this were kind of cool for some reason. Back in 6th grade or so, we had a big end-of-year class field trip where they put us all on a boat and cruised up and down the Willamette River, and we were supposed to take notes and there would be a quiz later, so that we could all pretend it was educational. I may have been the only one actually paying attention, teachers and parents included. At one point we passed the old Bridge 5.1, back before it was converted to a lift span, and I just thought it was the coolest thing ever, the way part of the bridge actually rotated out of the way.

Ok, so sure, this kind of bridge has its drawbacks. One of the big selling points when the lift span went in was that the harbor could now accommodate ships twice as wide as before, since the center pivot bit wasn't there as an obstruction anymore.

I feel kind of guilty this time around, like I haven't done enough work for a proper post. The "photo shoot" for this post took about 5 minutes (and I hope it doesn't show, but it probably does). I also don't have a lot of useful or interesting info to share about this bridge. A few years ago, there was a proposal to modify the bridge for the benefit of river traffic. The proposal was considered and eventually rejected, though. At this point, the Powers That Be are so focused on replacing the nearby I-5 bridge that messing with the railroad bridge is probably way down the agenda.

Except insofar as it would help out with the new I-5 (or "Columbia Crossing") bridge, anyway. I understand the rail bridge causes something of a design complication for the I-5 bridge. It opens practically right next to the Vancouver shore of the river, so to accommodate river traffic the new I-5 bridge will either have to do the same, which the design people don't like; or the shipping channel has to move south, which means modifying the rail bridge to be in line with the new bridge; or ships will have to make a sort of dog-leg sideways across the river between the two bridges in order to pass them.

I'm still not sure how I feel about the whole "Columbia Crossing" thing, so I don't really have an opinion about how they ought to deal with the shipping channel issue. Any option that doesn't involve ships hitting the bridge while I'm driving over it will probably be just fine, I guess.

Some photos of the bridge from around the interwebs, but mostly from Flickr:

from the river
pivoting
more pivoting
pivoting at night - a cool, oddly spooky photo.
one train crossing
two trains, side by side
vanishing point
a train and something called a "hi rail truck" I always thought those were cool, but until today I didn't know what they were called. Here's more about hi-rail trucks, if you're as curious as I was.
trains bound in opposite directions
more vanishing point - I wasn't quite brave enough to get up on the tracks and take one of these. It's a very busy bridge, you know.
from around the corner from where I took my photos
from the Hayden Island side of the bridge
again from Hayden Island
wider angle from Hayden Island
from mid-bridge, presumably from a train engine
the Marine Drive span of the bridge, which is actually a whole separate bridge, the Oregon Slough Railroad Bridge, aka "BNSF Bridge 8.8" from the Oregon mainland to Hayden Island.
christmas ships

Pics: Broadway Bridge

View Larger Map

Yes, kids, it's bridge time again. I realize I said earlier that I probably wasn't going to include some of the downtown bridges in the ongoing bridge-meandering project, on the grounds that lots of people walk and bike over them every day, everybody takes photos of them, and therefore they aren't "interesting".

Then I figured, hey, I've already got a bunch of photos of most of them, and they're right here, and I'm unfortunately rather big on doing stuff for the sake of completeness. And really the hard part about a bridge post is the research, not the photos or the walking. I doubt there's any groundbreaking new research to be done on most of the downtown bridges, and I'm not that keen on doing any, so by dropping that it ought to make it relatively simple to complete the set, so to speak. In that spirit, here are a few photos of the Broadway Bridge.



The Broadway comes up a bit short in the grace and grandeur departments, if you ask me, although the latticework looks kind of cool in a steampunk sort of way. And it's a nice color, you gotta give it that.





The main interesting thing about the Broadway is that it's of an unusual design, something called a "double-leaf Rall-type bascule". Which, as Multnomah County's page about the bridge explains, is a type of drawbridge where the 1250 ton counterweight and most of the drawbridge mechanism sits above the bridge deck. We're told it's the longest remaining bridge of its type in existence, and furthermore it's one of only three remaining in the country.

When they say the design is rare, what they mean is that it's an evolutionary dead end, and for good reason. It seems our fair city did the usual Oregon thing, and picked the design that was cheapest in the short term. As it often does, that turned out to mean that the bridge was very expensive to maintain in the long term. And finding spare parts when it breaks down? Not so easy.

Also, the complex design means it opens and closes verrrrry slowwwwwly. If you know anyone whose daily commute includes the Broadway, ask them about it sometime. They'll either get livid about it and turn the same shade of red as the bridge, or they'll smile and tell you what a Zenlike experience it is. The former possibility is the more likely of the two.



Incidentally, the bridge used to be one of those scary open steel grate designs, which are, uh, challenging when wet, and become an, um, advanced challenge when icy. After the recent renovation, the new bridge deck is made of something called FRP, or "fiber-reinforced polymer". Which I think means plastic. Really strong plastic. I hope. The material's manufacturer notes that the Broadway now has "the largest movable FRP vehicular bridge deck in the world." Take that, Seattle! Ha!



I don't know which gets more bike traffic, the Broadway or the Hawthorne, but it does seem that cyclists on the Broadway are much more determined about it, and they're going a lot faster. So if you happen to be an itinerant blogger with a camera, or a photographer with a blog, and you decide to stop and take a photo of something, you'll want to be aware of your surroundings. Everyone on the bridge except you is going with the flow, and you're just standing around dawdling and making an obstacle of yourself. It's not really a "not dying" angle, but there is a real potential for bodily harm. So pay attention. Trust me on this.



A couple of other links:

• The PortlandBridges page on the Broadway has some good photos, as you might expect.
  
• The bridge's Structurae entry.
  
• And the equivalent Bridgehunter page
  
• My inevitable Flickr photoset about the bridge.
  

Bridge 5.1

View Larger Map

A few photos of the railroad bridge in St. Johns. The bridge is officially known as "Burlington Northern Railroad Bridge 5.1", the 5.1 being the distance in miles from Union Station. I've always liked this bridge, first because it's so obscure, and secondly because it just looks cool, in a muscular, heavy-industrial sort of way. Just looking at it, you'd never guess the central lift span only dates to 1989. You'd just sort of expect anything build in 1989 to be all mauve and teal and loaded with silly postmodern crap, I mean, "pastiche", and it'd look as dated as parachute pants and big hair.

Anyway, I originally wanted to get closer to the bridge than this, but it's quite hard for mere mortals to get close to it on either side of the river. On the east bank there are, technically, roads down to the vicinity of the bridge, but there are also signs informing you that the whole area is a federal Superfund site. I think it has something to do with creosote manufacturing, which sounds kind of icky to me. I imagine that even if you could get down there as a mere mortal, you might very well leave as something else entirely. Longtime Gentle Reader(s) of this blog have probably noticed how I often say I really go to the mat for you guys, and I think I do on occasion, but I do draw a line at "Superfund". This post on Sprol names the old McCormick & Baxter site as one of the "Worst Places in the World", and talks about what's down there. More at Portland Public Art, believe it or not, since apparently there's some interesting graffiti around the place.

There's been talk of eventually putting a city park on the site, if they can ever get it cleaned up to everyone's satisfaction. Which I think may be a big if. In any event, we'll probably end up with luxury condo towers instead, since that's what always seems to happen.

So I have an idea about the bridge that I've been batting around, and I thought I'd toss it out in case anyone with power and influence happens to read this. A few years ago when the city revamped the Eastside Esplanade across from downtown, they added a pedestrian/bike path to the lower deck of the Steel Bridge, next to but completely separate from the railroad tracks. It might be a good idea to do the same with Bridge 5.1 here. We're forever hearing about how dangerous the St. Johns Bridge is for cyclists, and I'm sure that's true. I once knew a guy whose bike hit some bad pavement on the St. Johns, causing him to crash and break his arm in three places. And it would've been much worse if the semi behind him hadn't swerved out of the way just in time. We're told there's nowhere to put separate bike lanes on the St. Johns, and again, I'm sure that's true. The lanes are narrow as it is, and I don't see how you could safely narrow them any further. What's more, the St. Johns is the only game in town right now if you live up in that part of town and need to cross the river. So wouldn't it make sense to have a safer alternative in place? I'm not a civil engineer, so someone else would have to figure out whether a walk/bikeway is even possible with this bridge, much less how much it'd cost. I'm just saying it sounds like a good idea. Hint, hint.

If you'd like to see some pics that are a bit more professionally done, Portland Bridges has a couple of nice photos of the bridge here and here.