light rail bridge construction, march 2014

moss, hawthorne bridge

Lambert Slough Bridge

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The Lambert Slough Bridge is one of the more obscure destinations the ongoing bridge project has visited (so far). Lambert Slough is a small side channel of the Willamette River, separating Grand Island from the west bank of the river, and this little bridge is the only way on or off the island. I figured I ought to at least take a photo of the bridge on my way to the state park on the island, since I'd already established that this project included bridges on the Willamette at least as far south as Salem, and bridges out to islands were fair game, since I'd done the Sauvie Island Bridge. So I pretty much had to do this one for the sake of completeness. And completeness it is, since with this I think I've covered every bridge as far as Salem, plus one in Eugene. Except for the Champoeg Road pipeline bridge near Newberg, and I've more or less convinced myself that it doesn't count.

As with the OR-219 bridge, there's no page for this bridge at BridgeHunter or Structurae or any of the usual bridge fan sites, but there is a page about it at UglyBridges.com. In which we learn it's a reinforced concrete deck girder bridge, built in 1964, and any historical significance was "not determinable at this time" as of 2009. At that time it was given a 64.2% structural sufficiency rating, which is decent (certainly compared to the Sellwood Bridge's 2% rating) but down from 87% in 1991, probably due to an increase in traffic -- although 428 vehicles per day still counts as light traffic, I think.

As mentioned in my earlier Grand Island post, the island is threatened by a proposed gravel mine, which is currently working its way through the courts and the county permit process. Since this bridge is the only way on or off the island, gravel mining would mean a steady stream of big gravel trucks. The county commissioned an engineering study of the bridge in 2010 that concluded the bridge could handle the truck traffic, although not everyone's pleased that Yamhill County would be on the hook for higher maintenance costs due to increased wear and tear.

Union Street Bridge

A slideshow on Salem's Union Street Bridge over the Willamette River. It was built as a railroad bridge in 1913, but the railroad abandoned it in the 1990s. The city of Salem later purchased it and converted it into a bike and pedestrian bridge. Which, as you can see in my earlier posts about the nearby Center Street and Marion Street bridges, is something that was sorely needed here. I visited on a cool, drizzly day with intermittent downpours, and even then there was a steady stream of people walking and biking across.

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If the design of the bridge looks familiar, it could be because it was designed by the Waddell & Harrington engineering firm, the same company behind the Hawthorne, Interstate, and Steel bridges in Portland. Unlike the bridges in Portland, the lift span on the Union St. Bridge no longer functions. In fact it hasn't been operational since at least 1980, when the railroad was still using the bridge.

There was a brief time in the late 1990s or early 2000s when it looked as if the lift span would have to be repaired, to accomodate the Willamette Queen river cruise ship during high river levels. I can't find a definitive link about the story, but as I recall under federal law the railroad would have had to put the lift span back into operation if any commercial user demanded it. However it turned out to be much cheaper to modify the riverboat, the only vessel that would have needed the lift span. Its smokestacks were the real obstacle, and they were actually purely decorative, so they were given hinges to fold down so the ship could fit under the bridge. As I said, I wish I had a link to pass along as I might have some of the details of the story wrong, but that's how the story played out as best as I can recall. Anyway, the lift span is another interesting relic of the brief era when commercial shipping was a dominant form of transportation across Oregon, before railroads and eventually cars and trucks assumed that role.

Since it's strictly a pedestrian and bike bridge, walking across is pretty pleasant, and there's a nice view of the river and the other bridges. You see a bit of the city too, but Salem has a fairly low-rise and unphotogenic skyline, apart from the state capitol, and the city just isn't oriented around the river to the same degree that Portland is. In addition to the bridge itself, on the West Salem side of the river you also cross a long elevated train trestle over land; I was coming from the downtown Salem side and turned around before walking the whole trestle (due to the whole intermittent downpours thing I mentioned), so I haven't personally seen where it ends up. The video I linked to above starts from the West Salem side, though, so you can see it that way, if you're curious.

Marion Street Bridge

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The next bridge in the ongoing project is Salem's Marion Street Bridge. Built in 1952, it's somewhat more attractive than the Center St. Bridge, but it's still not what I'd call a visual treat. The bridge supports have a sort of pointed arch motif to them, similar to Portland's St. Johns Bridge, but in this case I'm not really sure why. Maybe the designer was just a big fan of pointed arches.

One downside of being built in 1952 is that the pedestrian walkway (there's only one, on the north side of the bridge) is pretty narrow. I tend to assume that midcentury bridges are like this because designers figured nobody would walk anywhere in the future. I can't prove that, but it sounds kind of reasonable to me. Anyway, it's narrower than the Center St. bridge walkway, and walking across is just as noisy due to the heavy traffic. I did a loop starting on the Salem side, across the Center St. and back across the Marion St., and I'd have to say the only reason to do this (other than as your daily commute, I suppose) would be purely for the sake of completeness. I'd be very surprised if this pops up on anyone's list of Top 10 Things To Do In Salem.

Just to verify that, I started searching the net for Top 10 lists about Salem. Here's one, which doesn't mention anything about bridges. It does mention going to Portland as #7 on the list, which seems like cheating to me. It also mentions the A.C. Gilbert museum, which sits next to the west end of the Marion St. Bridge. So you'll at least see the bridge, and maybe even park next to a pointed arch. So there's that. Another Top 10 list is less helpful; it's either auto-generated, or was compiled by someone who'd never been to Salem. As far as it's concerned your options are either guided walking tours (lots of them), or river rafting. And not all of the options are even in Oregon. So you can probably ignore that list. A top 5 list actually mentions a lot more than five things to do. It even shows a covered bridge, and mentions the A.C. Gilbert museum. But again, nothing about Willamette River bridges. So apparently this is our little secret for the time being, o Gentle Reader(s). (We really need to come up with cooler secrets, quite honestly.)

Center Street Bridge

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Today's installment in the ongoing bridge project takes us south to Salem's Center Street Bridge. The present-day bridge is pretty boring; the one semi-interesting detail is that it's the fourth bridge at this location (the part about bridges is somewhat down the page):

1. Built in 1880, the first Center Street Bridge was the very first bridge over the Willamette River. It was short-lived, however, collapsing during a flood in 1890.
2. The 1891 replacement was built in a hurry and was considered structurally unsound almost from the day it opened. It still took the city almost 20 years to replace it, however.
3. The 1918 bridge lasted much longer than its predecessors; it was renovated in 1953 after the Marion St. Bridge opened downstream of it, and was finally demolished in 1969.
4. The current bridge dates to around 1969 or so. It's actually kind of hard to find reliable information about it. The Wikipedia article makes it sound like the current bridge dates to 1918, even though a quick glance makes it obvious that this isn't the case.

The bridge is four lanes of eastbound traffic, with a pedestrian walkway on the north side, protected from vehicles by a concrete barrier. There's a long spiral ramp up to the bridge from the Salem waterfront, while on the West Salem side the walkway descends into a tangle of highway exits and underpasses. I haven't tried locating the walkway from that side, but I expect it's kind of challenging if you don't already know where it is.

There's suprisingly little to see while walking across the bridge. You see the city's two other bridges downstream, and trees along the riverbanks, and the tops of some low-rise buildings, but Salem is really not oriented toward the river. It hasn't been a commercial port for many decades now, and the idea of chic riverfront cafes doesn't appear to have caught on. Certain Salem-based relatives would argue that the idea of chic anything would have a hard time catching on in Salem -- but I don't live there and I honestly don't know the place that well, so I'm not going to editorialize. I do have a link to pass along though; after the debut of IFC's Portlandia, Salem residents on Twitter began speculating about what a "Salemia" show would be like. The results were pretty amusing, though a bit depressing.

For some reason, one of the conventions around this ongoing bridge project involves warning you about various implausible hazards that might befall you while innocently strolling across the bridge. Based on past history, the most likely candidate would be the city deciding it's time to build the fifth Center Street Bridge, and start demolishing the current one while you're still on it. It's not a city that does anything quickly, though. There's a current proposal out there to build an additional bridge in the greater Salem area, and it'll be years before they'll even break ground on it, if they ever do. So chances are you'll have had plenty of warning -- months or years, probably -- plus I just told you there was a miniscule but nonzero chance it might happen. So can't say you weren't warned.

broadway bridge, 8mm

hawthorne bridge, 8mm

OR 219 Bridge, Willamette River

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This installment of the ongoing bridge project takes us down to Newberg, where we find the Oregon Route 219 bridge over the Willamette River. I'm afraid I only have this one uninteresting photo of the bridge, and it was taken with a Blackberry, from a moving car, in the rain, with a semi tailgating me. The Structurae page linked to above has some photos from the side so you can see it's pretty uninteresting from that angle too. The bridge doesn't appear to have a name, and it doesn't even merit its own Wikipedia page, even though it's the only bridge over the Willamette between Wilsonville and Salem.

Usually when I link to a bridge's Structurae page, I also point at its Bridgehunter page, since each tends to have info the other doesn't. This bridge has no Bridgehunter page, but it turns out Bridgehunter has a sister site, UglyBridges.com, which describes itself thusly:

This website provides listings for "ugly" bridges not suitable for our companion site, Bridgehunter.com. It also highlights the "ugly" condition of our nation's bridges thanks to years of neglect and deferred maintenance.

As you probably guessed from this buildup, this bridge does have an UglyBridges page. So it's a typical, humdrum, non-photogenic concrete deck girder bridge, but there's sort of an upside to that. A recent OSU study of wear and tear on aging concrete deck girder bridges used it as a test subject, presumbably because it was utterly typical. I'm not a civil engineer and it's not clear to me what their conclusions mean in that study. I think they're saying the gathered data will help them better model shear effects on this type of bridge. Not totally sure though. The phrase "significant diagonal cracks" did jump out at me. It's the kind of phrase that tends to jump out at laypeople.

In case you were wondering, it was not possible to walk across this bridge. There are no sidewalks, and much of the traffic consists of extremely large trucks, all of them in a huge hurry to get somewhere. The "not dying" angle is way too obvious and easy to imagine, and not particularly funny either, so instead I'll just pass on one semi-random link I came across, and we'll wrap up this installment of the bridge adventure.

Back in 1993, McMinnville's Evergreen Air Museum had acquired Howard Hughes's infamous Spruce Goose, and had to move it from Santa Barbara, CA, to its new home. This involved disassembling the plane and barging the pieces almost the entire distance. My employer at the time was located right on the Willamette, and I was able to watch as various airplane parts were barged through downtown Portland. Further upriver, the wings were the last major part of the plane to arrive, and they squeaked under the 219 bridge with just one foot to spare.

So that's not really the most exciting story. It was a tight fit, but nothing terrible actually happened, and the rest is vintage aviation history, which I'm not that wild about. But it's the most exciting thing I was able to dig up about this bridge, and now I can at least say that I tried. FWIW.

Washington-Jefferson Street Bridge

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A few photos of Eugene's Washington-Jefferson Street Bridge and the Willamette River nearby. It's not a very interesting bridge; it's a grey concrete bridge from 1968 that carries Interstate 105 (and not Washington or Jefferson streets) over the Willamette. I only took photos of it because we happened to stay at a hotel nearby a few years ago, and the bridge was right out the window, so there was basically zero effort involved.

To give you some idea of just how uninteresting the bridge is, there's no Wikipedia article about it, and there isn't even a Structurae page for it, which tells you that even hardcore bridge nerds don't pay attention to it.



I forgot I'd taken any photos of the bridge until I bumped into them in a dark corner of iPhoto recently, and I realized these were the only photos I have of anything at all in Eugene, since I basically never go there or even give much thought to the place. Prior to these photos, I think the last time I'd been to Eugene was back in college in 1990, when a friend dragged me to a Grateful Dead show at Autzen Stadium. I'll just say it was anthropologically fascinating; musically less so.



I've always thought it was strange that Eugene ended up with a little Interstate highway of its very own, but apparently there were once proposals for an even more elaborate freeway system. The Roosevelt Freeway was cancelled around the same time as Portland's Mt. Hood Freeway, and repeated proposals for a so-called "West Eugene Parkway" have been thwarted by community opposition.



I don't claim to have any insight into Eugene beyond the common hippie stereotypes, and I don't like trading in stereotypes, so I don't know what (if anything) people think about the bridge, or the interstate in general. I'd tend to assume they aren't fans, or more precisely there are very vocal activists within the larger community who aren't fans. But I really have no idea.



The opposite side of the bridge is home to Washington/Jefferson Park, which sits on either side of, and partly underneath, the bridge. The city refers to it as "previously troubled", and notes that they're putting in a big skatepark under the bridge to help revitalize the place. I think they're hoping for something like Portland's Burnside Skatepark, which was built guerrilla style back in the 1980s.



So anyway, I've posted all the Eugene photos I own, and I've filled a non-geotagged hole in this humble blog's map of the world (or I will once I generate an updated version of the map, since that's still not automatic.) On my big TODO and Maybe-TODO list for this blog, there are currently no additional Eugene-area items, and I also don't know of any compelling non-blog reasons to make the two hour drive south. I'm not saying I won't think about Eugene again for another 20 years, but I can't rule it out either. So, um, enjoy.

broadway bridge, april 2011

I-5 Bridge, Santiam River

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Today's fun bridge adventure takes us south out of Portland, to the I-5 bridge over the Santiam River. It's not a terribly interesting bridge (ok, pair of bridges), just a big modern concrete job. Note that although there's a photo of the bridge on Wikimedia, nobody's ever bothered writing a proper Wikipedia article about it, which tells you something when you consider all the weird things that do merit their own Wikipedia articles. I only bothered with this bridge because I happened to stop at the adjacent Santiam Rest Area, and I noticed there was a bridge right there, and I figured I ought to take some photos of it, and here they are.

You will not be completely surprised to learn that the previous bridge on the site, from the highway's previous career as US 99E, was far more interesting, a classic Conde McCullough-style arch bridge. This is probably where the scalloped sorta-arch motif on the underside of the current bridge comes from. There's another photo of the old bridge on Flickr.

It turns out that the old bridge has a surviving sibling nearby. The Jacob Conser Bridge carries Oregon Highway 164 over the Santiam River at Jefferson, OR, and you'll note that it looks similar but not quite identical to the lost bridge. The state highway department liked to do variations on a theme back then, trying to make each bridge just a little distinctive. BridgeHunter credits the bridge to Glenn S. Paxson, McCullough's successor as State Bridge Engineer. Who, believe it or not, is also "credited" with Portland's unlovely Marquam Bridge. No, really, he is.

(I should point out that I'm not actually expanding the ongoing bridge project to Santiam River bridges generally. If I'm in the area again I might go check out the one in Jefferson, but I'm not promising anything. I'm also not expanding the city and state park project to cover highway rest areas, because that would be creepy. Eew.)

daybreak, hawthorne bridge

The main problem with sunrises is that you have to wake up early to catch them. If you go back over the nearly five (!) year history of this humble blog, the vast majority of sunrise photos I've posted have come from cold and clear (or at least only partly cloudy) days in midwinter, when the sunrise occurs latest. If you see sunrises any other time of the year, either I'm on vacation, or some idiot (other than myself) scheduled a meeting at 7 or 8am and I snapped a few quick shots while trudging resentfully to the office. Which is basically what happened this time. You're welcome.

You might have noticed that there haven't been a lot of posts lately that involved a quick pre-work expedition to some local bridge or city park or obscure statue or something. That was before the advent of 9am meetings. Which are an only slightly more civilized practice than 7 and 8am meetings. And then only because a.) we have a machine that brews up a semi-palatable quad espresso, and b.) the jug of aspirin on my desk is never empty.

I should point out that, for an engineer, complaining about meetings is not the same thing as complaining about work. Meetings don't count as Real Work, they're something that interrupts Real Work, and sometimes makes you go back and revisit the Real Work you did last week all because some PHB had a new whim.

So, in short, I do realize this humble blog's gotten a little monotonous of late, and I'm trying to figure out what I can do about that. It could be that I just need to take more vacations, and take more vacation photos when I do. And I can always post more kitten photos. That never seems to get old.

Morrison Bridge Revisited

After years of discussion, and a year of construction, the new pedestrian & bike path on the Morrison Bridge finally opened at the beginning of April. Back in March 2008, I did a long post about how to walk the Morrison Bridge and not die, probably. The "not dying" part was because the bridge was rather unpleasant to walk across, even scary at times, and biking across was flat-out illegal. With the new path opening, it was time to go back and take another look.

The first change you'll notice is that getting onto the bridge from the downtown side is no longer a bizarre and mysterious process. You just go to the corner of 2nd & Alder (as shown in the top photo), get on the path, and head east. This section of sidewalk didn't exist at all before. At one time you had to had to go another block east, down some steps, across the MAX tracks, through an ooky chain-link fence tunnel under one of the bridge ramps, and then up a flight of narrow stairs to get to the bridge. Some of the signs prohibiting pedestrians and nonmotorized vehicles are still present, or were when the photo was taken:



Another view of the start of the new path:



The old way to get on the bridge lies somwhere to the right, beyond the "To First Ave." sign:



And already, there's a photo angle that basically wasn't possible before now. The MAX tracks under the Morrison, as seen from above:



If you look more closely, you'll see that the old route to get on the bridge is marked on 1st, a diagonal stretch of brick among the cobblestones. Someday, some intrepid urban explorer will find it and do a blog post about it -- or whatever the replacement for blogs is circa 2030 -- wondering what on earth it was for.



There's also a better angle on the old path under the bridge ramp:



There's now a crosswalk where the new section of sidewalk joins the widened existing section. The part in the foreground spirals down to Naito Parkway. That part's actually been widened twice now, the first time a few years ago when the Hawthorne was closed for repairs and the Morrison hosted a temporary version of the current path. I remember at the time people suggesting the Morrison arrangement be made permanent, and the city insisting it was impossible. Apparently that word didn't mean what they thought it meant.

Note the couple of "No Bikes" signs here. These ones aren't leftovers from the old days. They're to indicate that westbound cyclists are supposed to take the ramp down to Naito, and not proceed straight to 2nd & Alder, as in the original design for the path. That design would've involved cyclists heading the wrong way into a busy one-way intersection, with an array of confusing bike boxes their only protection from traffic. Either the city realized there was no way this could be done safely, or more likely someone in the bike community pointed it out to them loudly and repeatedly and somehow convinced the city their original design wasn't divinely inspired, which almost never happens.

In short, these "No Bikes" signs are a good thing. Not that I think anyone's going to heed them.



So here's the new path in all its glory. Much wider, and a seriously heavy duty guardrail between you and traffic.



Another view:



And another:



Next up, here's the path on the drawbridge part of the Morrison. There's some sort of rubbery material on top of the bridge's metal grate surface for the bike portion of the path. I guess we'll see in a few years how durable that turns out to be, and whether it gets maintained properly when it needs replacing.

One thing I still haven't figured out is what the guardrail does when the drawbridge opens. I haven't seen it in action close enough to tell, and it's not obvious when you walk over the bridge. Looking at where the drawbridge joins the fixed part of the bridge, it's not clear how it accommodates the bridge being hinged at that point.



Mid-bridge, where the two leaves of the drawbridge fit together:



Another view:



A memorial plaque dedicated to two pedestrians who were hit and killed by vehicles (in separate incidents) while crossing the bridge.



The walkway at the east side of the bridge, which still only extends as far as Water Avenue. From here, the eastbound viaduct is still car-only, and (unlike the Hawthorne) you still have to make your way to Grand Ave. and parts east on surface streets. That's one limitation of the new amenities. The other is that nothing was done to improve the sidewalk on the north side of the bridge. The north side goes the full length from Grand to downtown, but with a couple of extremely sketchy underpasses that keep pedestrians away from the freeway ramps. There's certainly room to improve on that, but not at a price tag the city can afford right now. So maybe someday.



Looking west toward downtown. The spiral ramp down to the Esplanade, which starts here, is unchanged. Which is fine with me; it has a sort of late 50's - early 60's retro-futuristic feel to it, like something out of the Jetsons. I've never ridden a bike up or down it, but I expect it's rather exciting.



One other little improvement here: The old walkway inexplicably didn't take you straight to Water Avenue. Instead, it looped you around behind the bridge ramp you just came down, and dumped you off by the stairs up to the Great Bus Stop in the Sky. They look like stairs up to a continuation of the main walkway, but it's a dead end, like something out of the Winchester Mystery House. There's nothing you can do up there except wait for the next eastbound bus. And I've never, ever seen anyone do that.

So now, the walkway takes you straight to Water Ave., and they seem to have jackhammered up the old path. You can still get to the bus stop stairs if you need to, but now they look even more orphaned than they did before.



Looking back up the ramp. The traffic lane looks almost too narrow for cars, but I saw several SUVs drive it with plenty of space to spare.



And the area around the bus stop stairs, still a work in progress at the time I took these photos:



So that's the grand tour. I'd really like to complain and make snarky, cutting remarks about all the changes, and in truth I wouldn't be shocked if a friend of the mayor's opens an upscale bike shop / martini bar / doggie day spa in the ground floor of a new condo tower on Water Ave. right at the east end of the walkway. That's just how things generally work out here in Portland. But taken by itself (& ignoring who might be enriched by it), I have to say the new walkway is a huge, huge improvement.

So now if they could just do something similar to the Ross Island, then... well, then I'd have to find a new esoteric subject to gripe and be all pedantic about. Which I guess would be ok.