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.

Silent Messenger

Back in January, when I was up at OHSU quite a lot, I happened to notice a couple of statues in front of the Shriners Children's Hospital. Both depict a fez-wearing Shriner holding a child in one arm, and crutches in the other. Odd statues are sort of a natural topic for this humble blog, so I snapped a couple of camera phone photos. It turns out the statues are based on an iconic (to Shriners) 1970 photo titled "Editorial Without Words", and statues based on it (titled Silent Messenger) grace Shriners hospitals and facilities across the country, similar to the Ideal Scout statue located at many Boy Scout offices. Apparently no two Silent Messengers are exactly alike, though; it seems the gentleman's fez is always customized to bear the logo of a local Shrine organization. The two at OHSU are also wearing different outfits and carrying the crutches differently. As a non-Shriner, I have no idea why they have two statues or what the differences between them might symbolize, if anything. It's possible one of them was taken from their old childrens hospital at 82nd & Sandy. The OHSU website has more photos of both statues.

If this seems like something you'd want on your mantel, you're in luck, sort of. The design also comes in smaller sizes so in theory you can have one of your very own. Although apparently you have to join the Shriners (which involves first joining the Masons) and then be awarded one for distinguished meritorious service or something along those lines. Which seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to get a small statuette. But to each his own, I guess.

I realize Shriners do charitable works for kids and have jolly parade floats and so forth, but their archaic fantasy Middle Eastern theme kind of weirds me out. Charitable works or no, it would be hard for a fraternal group to get away with a comical blackface theme today, or a Fu Manchu fake-Chinese one, but spoofing the Arab world is apparently still hilarious in 2013.

I took a peek at the local branch's current newsletter, and they seem to be uniformly elderly white men (plus the women of the ladies' auxiliary, which is a whole other issue). As this is also the core demographic of Fox News and AM talk radio, I'd speculate there's a nonzero overlap of the two. I'd be genuinely curious to hear one of those guys explain how he reconciles the two things: On one hand, wanting to bomb the people of the Middle East back into the Stone Age, and on the other, wanting to dress up and pretend to be one of them. It puzzles me, and I'd honestly like to understand how they manage it.

Two Plum Park expedition

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Today's adventure takes us to tiny Two Plum Park, on NE 7th in an increasingly hip area of NE Portland. The park's origin story (via the city's page about the place):

One day King neighborhood resident Joe Martin got tired of looking at the overgrown vacant lot near his home. The retired Union Pacific Railroad worker went down to Goodwill, bought an old lawn mower, and began cutting down the tall weeds. Neighbors joined him in cleaning out garbage and planting flowers. Soon they began talking about turning the lot into a park.

The timing was fortunate. The Trust for Public Land had recently obtained funding from the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Fund to help create parks in Portland and other cities. PP&R hosted several community meetings inviting residents to help design the park. The neighbors persuaded the city to expand the plans to include two lots. The city paid off the back taxes and took possession of the lots. The park was completed in November 2001; the neighbors named it Two Plum Park after the two plum trees that grow there.

It's an unusual story, not least because vacant lots in this part of town almost always become infill development and cause endless angry neighborhood meetings. In any case, the park now features a curving path, some flowers, some play equipment, a historical mural, a hidden geocache, and... well, that's about it for now. The park's about to get a shiny new park bench, though, and because this is an increasingly hip part of town, the bench was funded with a Kickstarter. Seriously. The Oregonian's done a couple of stories about the project, and there's even a slick promotional video about the effort.

A community-driven project like this is awesome and inspiring and so forth. No argument there. But because I am a snarky person, I just need to point out that Kickstarter isn't really a full replacement for funding public services adequately. I'm fairly certain there are parks in Rockwood or Lents or Cornelius that could use a new park bench or two, and will never get them this way. And these areas may have additional needs beyond park benches, come to think of it.

tulips (pink)

irises (spring 2013)