Pics: Broadway Bridge

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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.
  

Alexandra Avenue Bridge

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So today's unusual adventure takes us to an obscure corner of Forest Park to what you might call Portland's own "Bridge to Nowhere". The Alexandra Avenue Bridge is a fairly long and substantial (although narrow) bridge over a deep forested ravine, with a creek somewhere far below. It seems like you've wandered into the back of beyond, although you're actually just a few blocks off NW Thurman St. As you go uphill on Thurman, turn right onto Gordon St., and follow it to where it turns right again and becomes Alexandra Avenue. The bridge is right there. But strangely, Alexandra Avenue dead-ends into Forest Park just a few blocks past the bridge, and doesn't connect to any other streets. The city clearly went to a lot of trouble and expense to build a bridge here, but it doesn't really go anywhere, and basically nobody uses it. So the obvious question is "Why?"






I haven't been able to find a definitive answer, but I have a couple of competing theories:

1. The bridge was supposed to spur residential development further north, and it just sort of didn't work out. Forest Park wasn't created until the late 1940s, and prior to that the whole area was platted out for more upscale West Hills houses stretching off to the horizon. Leif Erickson Drive was supposed to be the main drag through the future ritzy suburb, but there were problems with mudslides, and then the Depression came along, and eventually the city ended up with all the land due to unpaid property taxes. The bridge was built in 1922, which would be the right timeframe for this.
2. It's really more of a "Bridge to Almost Nowhere". There are two things at the far end of the bridge, and perhaps the bridge was always intended just for them. There's a huge Water Bureau tank on the far side, and if you look at the photos above you can see what looks like a large water main under the deck of the bridge. So possibly the water's the main thing, so to speak, and they just figured, hey, if we're building a bridge we might as well let cars use it too. So that's one possibility.

The second thing on the far side of the bridge is the Salvation Army's White Shield Center, which they describe as:

The Salvation Army White Shield Center has been located in Northwest Portland since 1917. The center began as a maternity home and hospital. We continue to serve the needs of pregnant and parenting clients between the ages of 12 and 18 but have added an additional program to serve the needs of adolescent girls who need a safe, secure, and nurturing environment. Clients are referred to the programs by state social service agencies or the juvenile justice system.

The term "maternity home and hospital" in this case meant it was the place where young girls who'd "gotten in trouble" would go to live for a few months until the baby was born and given up for adoption. The whole idea was to be quiet and discreet about it, given the extreme social stigma attached to unwed mothers back then. There'd be the usual cover story about the girl going off to visit Aunt Edna for a few months, and afterward everyone would act -- outwardly -- as if nothing had happened, and society could go on pretending this sort of thing didn't happen, at least not in our fair city. It was a very different time, I'll say that, all about keeping up appearances and "respectability" and false facades. I suppose at the time a "maternity home and hospital" was a way to treat the issue compassionately, while also helping to hide it, so that society could go on not facing facts as they really are.

So because of all that, you don't really want your maternity home to be located on a busy neighborhood street, with nosy neighbors and Model T's whizzing by constantly. If the dates are right, the center was here first, and then the bridge a few years later. So it's possible the bridge was built to serve this place, and Alexandra Avenue was never meant to extend any further than it does.

While researching, I came across the White Shield Project, a site dedicated to collecting memories and accounts about life at White Shield over the years. Here's a forum thread on the same topic, with a few responses discussing the place.

A bit more info via the Oregonian: November 2006 article, and this rather sad Margie Boule story from September '03.



So, in short, I still don't know why the bridge is here. At least I can try to explain how I came across the bridge. If you've read any of my recent posts here, you might have noticed I've been doing a local bridge thing for a couple of months now, on and off. It seems there are a couple of sites on the net that are just big databases of bridges and other structures from around the world. So naturally once I was done looking at the page for the McLoughlin Bridge, or whichever one took me there, I thought, hey, let's see the list of what they've got for the Portland area. From there, went (as I tend to do) hey, I've never heard of that one, what's the deal there? Looked at the photos on the site, decided it looked interesting. Then found it on Google Maps and figured it was reasonably nearby. And thus, a new TODO item was born.



So here are the bridge pages at Structurae, Bridgehunter, and Brueckenweb. You might notice that two of the three sites are out of Germany, for some reason. Also, they all seem to be working off the same master list. The bridge shows up almost nowhere else on the interwebs, but it does show up on the City Bridge Inventory, where we learn it has a "sufficiency rating" of 51.70 out of 100. Which is not great by any means, and it may rank as high as it does because it gets almost no traffic. One component of the sufficiency rating is whether the bridge has enough capacity to handle current & projected vehicle traffic. And on that count, at least, it seems to suffice quite well. The inventory also describes the bridge as in "POOR" condition, and also calls it "Functionally Obsolete" (along with a lot of other bridges in town). The bridge also appears on this list of bridges eligible for repair or replacement. In which we learn that rehab costs were estimated at ~$900k, compared to ~$1.2M to replace the bridge, so rehab it probably is, whenever they get around to it. We also learn that the stream it crosses is simply called "Unnamed Creek". One other little bit of trivia to pass along: According to PortlandMaps, if a neighborhood had sprung up around the bridge, it would have been known as "Blythswood", at least according to the tax rolls (example). If history had turned out a little differently, if the Depression hadn't come along, and possibly if there hadn't been a La Niña year at just the wrong time, (with the accompanying heavy rains and mudslides), right now we might be muttering and shaking our fists at the rich twits up in Blythswood, careening around the narrow streets in their monstrous luxury SUVs. Most likely there would be a "Friends of the Alexandra Avenue Bridge" organization, with big gala fundraisers every so often, and there'd be nature walks and assorted family-friendly activities. The creek below would have a name, and there'd be all sorts of public handwringing about watersheds and native fish species. I can safely say all this based on how the locals get worked up over Tryon Creek and Balch Creek, further south. In any case, as always I've got a few more photos in my Flickr photoset about the place. Updated 9/09: We have linkage from here, on a wiki page about White Shield. I haven't read much of the site, but the person/group/organization behind it appears to be very skeptical about teen programs such as this.

Mystery Fountain

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So here's a rare case where my Google™-Fu has utterly failed me. A while back, I took a bunch of photos of this groovy 60's fountain in my neighborhood, figuring that I'd then go dig up a bunch of info about it and put together a mildly interesting post about the thing, as I tend to do. And I would've done that, but I can't find anything useful about it anywhere on the interwebs.



The fountain interested me because it's in my general neighborhood (it's just off SW 1st Avenue, near Arthur St.), it's pretty large, and it's done in the same modernist style as the vastly more famous Keller and Lovejoy fountains further north. I don't know if it was the same design team, or an "inspired by" thing, or just that this was the way everyone built fountains in that era. I'm curious, but that info doesn't seem to exist anywhere, at least not in electronic form.



I think the main reason for this is that unlike the Keller & Lovejoy fountains, this one isn't part of a public park. Instead, it sits in a plaza between two rather forbidding office buildings, the Marquam Building, and the ADP Plaza. The Marquam Bldg. link includes a mention and photo of the fountain, which is the only mention of it I've found on the net, but there's no additional info about it there. The only other photo of it on the net is the Google map shown above, which shows is that the fountain is octagonal when seen from space.



Yes, that's a duck. There was a solitary male mallard hanging out in the fountain when I dropped by. I guess to a mallard the fountain must look like an ultra-mod swingin' 60's bachelor pad. Didn't seem to be helping him with the ladies, though.



At the time I took the photos I did look around for a plaque or sign or label or anything with the fountain's name or possibly the designer's name, but no luck there either. I suppose I could've missed that, if it was small enough.



Incidentally, according to this article, the ADP Plaza project figured in the genesis of Portland's high-powered, ultra-connected Gerding Edlen development firm. So make of that what you will.



The building's now owned by one of those "REIT" things that I barely understand. It does get a mention in a recent SEC filing of theirs, which notes the building was constructed in 1981. I imagine that would make it newer than the fountain, although the water from the fountain cascades down into the ADP Plaza parking garage, so it's hard to say for sure.



So I've basically concluded I've hit a wall here. I suppose I could go and call up the building management for either building and see if they know anything, but that's not really my way. I'm curious, but in the end I'm not quite curious enough to pick up the phone. If I did that, I suppose I'd have to explain I was some random blogger from the internet and I wanted to know all about their fountain, so that I could post about it and attract hordes of random blog readers to their surprisingly secluded little plaza. Which might lead them to say no. Or worse, laugh at me. Or most likely, not know anything more about the fountain than I do.



In any case, my Flickr photoset has a few more photos beyond what's here, in case you're curious or interested or whatever.

John McLoughlin Bridge, Clackamas River

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My semi-ongoing bridge-wandering project took me down to Oregon City the other day to check out the pretty, but sadly run down, Oregon City Bridge. On my way back, I thought I'd stop briefly and check out a second bridge nearby. This is the Dr. John McLoughlin Memorial Bridge, which carries Highway 99E over the Clackamas River.

I didn't really have high hopes for it, and I almost didn't stop. I vaguely knew there was a bridge here, but it's a busy street and not a very big river, and there's no big "oh, cool" moment while driving over it, if it registers at all. It didn't really sound like it would be very interesting, but I was in the neighborhood (for once), so I figured what the heck, I'd just stop for a few minutes and take a quick peek.

Turns out the bridge is rather nice, actually. The McLoughlin bridge dates back to 1933, and sports some nice Art Deco touches and has a light, open and airy feel to it. There's no bike lane, but the sidewalk seems wider than nearly all other bridges in town, and there's a guardrail (plus the structure of the bridge itself) between you and vehicle traffic. There's even an attractive view of the Clackamas River. It's really a very cool river. If, like many Portlanders, you turn up your nose at it because of the word "Clackamas" in the name, you're really missing out.

So it's kind of too bad it's not somewhere where it'd be more useful to me. I'm very rarely down in Oregon City, and I don't think I've ever actually stopped in Gladstone even once for any purpose, so walking between the two, just not a very common occurrence.

You might've noticed I didn't bother with the "not dying" bit in the title. The bridge itself is pretty decent, and the "not dying" theme just sort of doesn't work. Quite honestly, if you're walking or biking along Highway 99E, the bridge is probably the safest spot for miles around. On either side, it's wall-to-wall mini-malls, no bike lanes, narrow sidewalks with lots of curb cuts, people tend to be driving large trucks and SUVs, and they don't expect you to be there. So just stay on the freakin' bridge, and you'll be fine, probably.

The Structurae page about the bridge has more photos, including a cool award plaque for being named "Most Beautiful Steel Bridge, Class C" in 1933 by something called the American Institute of Steel Construction, which still exists -- although it looks like the prize stuff is now handled by a related organization called the National Steel Bridge Alliance. Their online list of awards only dates back to 1996, unfortunately, but I do see that the St. Johns Bridge renovation project won a prize in 2007. Strictly speaking, the McLoughlin bridge received an "award of merit", which seems to be one tier down from a "prize" in steel bridge parlance. But still. An award's an award.

Here's a 1933 color photo of the bridge when it was new. Looks pretty much the same, doesn't it? Wikimedia has a photo of the bridge from a different angle than mine, and you can see the 3 arch structure a bit better there.

There's also a confusing mention of the bridge in Best Places Portland:

More interesting [than the Interstate Bridge] is the OREGON CITY BRIDGE (1922). The only Portland-area span designed by Conde McCullough, this 745-foot arch bridge features fluted Art Deco main piers and hammered inset panels. Just north, McCullough's McLoughlin Bridge has been rated the most beautiful steel bridge of its kind in the U.S.

So first we learn that the Oregon City Bridge is the only McCullough bridge in town, and in the very next sentence we're told the McLoughlin bridge is his too. Go figure.

Other than that, there really isn't too much to say about the bridge. It has a cameo in a gory, unsolved 1940s murder case, in which part of the body was found near the bridge. Seriously, I'm not kidding about the gory part.

So does this mean I'm expanding the bridge-moseying project beyond Willamette River bridges? Well, no, or mostly no. I keep talking about the two Columbia River bridges, and I'll probably end up doing those at some point, eventually. And now that I stare at the map a little, it turns out there really aren't very many bridges over the Clackamas River. There's this one, obviously. There's a rail bridge and a bridge for I-205 further upstream that I think we can file under "not safe for pedestrians". There's also an old bridge around 82nd Drive near the High Rocks area that's supposed to be for bikes and pedestrians, but I understand it's been closed since 2006 due to a fire and subsequent insurance litigation. There are more bridges further upstream, around Carver, Barton Park, Estacada, and beyond, but I'm ok with filing those as "outside the Portland area". As in, maybe, if I'm in the area anyway, and it seems "interesting", and I'm in the mood for it, but it's a very low priority. In other words, I think this may be the only Clackamas River bridge that's within any reasonable project scope. So I'm going to go ahead and declare Mission Accomplished on river #2. Hooray, or whatever.

How to walk the St. Johns Bridge and not die (continuing the theme)

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So the latest installment of my apparent bridge-wandering project takes us north to the gothic, mega-photo-licious St. Johns Bridge. Everybody knows it, everybody loves it, but what's it like to walk across? I figured I'd go check it out.

Despite its mildly remote location, the St. Johns is a contender for most photographed bridge in town. It's not hard to see why. There's just something about suspension bridges (if there's an ugly suspension bridge out there, I've never seen or heard of it), and something about Art Deco anything. The bridge has its own Flickr group (to which I've made exceedingly humble contributions now and then). The thing is pretty damn photogenic. It can't hurt that, like most of North Portland, the St. Johns neighborhood is bursting with "young creative" types, who all seem to drop by and snap a few photos of the bridge when they aren't at a band rehearsal or a gallery opening or whatever.

What's more, Blue Moon Camera is nearby in central St. Johns, so if you're trying to use up the last couple of shots on a roll of film or two, the bridge is an obvious subject. Hell, that's what I was doing. Besides the trusty (and at the time a bit dusty) DSLR, I also had the Holga and old Kodak folder along. I figured I'd post some of those photos when I get them back, so long as they don't suck, or they do suck in an interesting way. Then this post lingered in my drafts folder long enough that I got the photos back, so I've included a few of them. I think I did ok on the "suck in an interesting way", except possibly for the "interesting" part.

Like my earlier Sellwood Bridge "adventure", I did this as a quickie trip before work, so I figured I'd drive there, although I could've taken TriMet from downtown if I'd had more time. There's even less on the west end of the bridge than there is at the Sellwood, and nowhere at all that looks safe to park. So my plan, if you can call it a plan, was to drive up to St. Johns, park, walk across one side, cross the street on the west end, and walk back on the other side of the bridge. Stop every so often, take a few photos, not die, etc.

Updated: A user comment points out that there is, in fact, a place to park on the west side, and it's a rather good spot to take photos of the bridge, and there's even a trailhead into Forest Park from here. I think I know the spot, which is kind of a wide spot in the road next to the south-side bridge ramp. I've even seen people parking there, but I wasn't sure what it was for and neglected to mention it here. So I stand corrected.

It's actually kind of hard finding original stuff to say about the St. Johns Bridge. It gets a lot of attention, and I think all the angles have been covered pretty well. On top of that, my, er, expedition to the bridge was pretty uneventful. In short, coming up with a compelling narrative for this post has been kind of a problem. The St. Johns doesn't offer the absurdity of the Morrison, or the raw scariness of the Ross Island, and it's not a punchline like the Sellwood. And it's not broken-down and smelly like the bridge down in Oregon City. The "not dying" angle is a real stretch this time, and it's mostly there because it's the theme for the series, so I've shoveled it off toward the end of the post, unless I move it again.

So let's just get to the walking, and take it from there, shall we?

Actually first we have to get to the parking, and then the walking. Finding a parking spot is reasonably straightforward unless you become lost in St. Johns, where the street grid is the proverbial "maze of twisty little passages, all different". To be on the safe side (not having a GPS unit handy), I figured I'd just take the very first parking spot I came across, and save myself the trouble. That turned out to be next to an imposing brick building right off the east end of the bridge. Prior to 1915, when St. Johns was a separate incorporated city, this building was City Hall. Now it's a Portland Police office. I'd like to think that reduces the odds that your car will be broken into while you're off hiking the bridge. If you're interested in the long and somewhat odd history of St. Johns, check out this interesting series. The page about the bridge includes a bunch of construction photos. Yikes. You couldn't pay me enough to do that.

Before we really get started walking, a couple more history links to pass along: A post at OregonLive; ODOT's Historic Bridges page (note, their doc on the St. Johns is a MS Word doc for some reason.); and the Center for Columbia River History has old news snippets from the bridge's dedication in 1931. And more historical tidbits on this interesting mailing list post from last March.

My favorite historical bit about St. Johns is the name. The name is not a religious reference; it refers to a local crazy old hermit, not any of the many saints named John. Although I suppose those guys were all crazy old hermits too, just a few centuries earlier, with more gullible neighbors. So the fancy bridge with all the pointed arches and such seems to be the result of a misread of local history. Although I'm not sure how you'd design a bridge with a "crazy old hermit" theme. Most likely you'd need to find yourself a second crazy old hermit, someone with an engineering background and an obsessive drive to make primitive folk art. And then I don't think I'd trust the resulting bridge.

So now we're really walking, finally. Getting onto the bridge is easy, if you're coming from the east side. Just get on the Philadelphia Ave. sidewalk and keep going. Coming from the west it's a different story. There's a sidewalk along the long, long ramp up to the bridge from Highway 30. It's so long it has its own name, "NW Bridge Avenue". But I'm not sure there's a sidewalk along Highway 30 to get to Bridge Avenue, since that's smack in the middle of industrial NW Portland. I suppose I ought to have tried that. It certainly would've been more of an "urban exploration" adventure that way. But since I didn't notice any sidewalks along Highway 30, for the life of me I have no idea how you'd pull this off. Even then, all you'd really be adding is a long walk uphill. Yay.

There wasn't a superabundance of bikes or pedestrians the day I was there. There were a few, I think more than on the other bridges I've posted about. Mostly bikes, which makes sense. There isn't much of anything immediately on the west end of the bridge except the howling wilderness of Forest Park, so if you walked across, where would you go from there, exactly?

Some of the cyclists looked like they might be commuters heading downtown. If you live up in North Portland and need to get downtown by bike, the St. Johns is one of your few options for getting across the river. If that was my commute, I'd likely prefer to ride in on the eastside and cross on the Broadway, which has far fewer semis barreling across it. It's possible there's a downside to that route that I'm not aware of. I can see the St. Johns route being faster, if you survive. And at times when traffic isn't so heavy, it sounds like the ride can be a contemplative experience.

Another possible St. Johns bike commute doesn't involve heading downtown at all, and instead follows Germantown Road over the West Hills out to Beaverton. Seriously. I'm not making this up; I've heard of people doing this, although I've never met anyone who has. I'm not sure I want to, either. I'm certain they're all ten feet tall, eat nothing but raw shark meat, and routinely get speeding tickets on the uphill parts of this commute. If that describes you, or you kind of fancy the notion of it describing you, the St. Johns is pretty much your only option for getting across the river. Unless, I mean, you leap the river on your bike, Evel Knievel style. Or you take a deep breath and ride across the river bottom. Or you simply command the waters to part and let you pass. You get the idea.

Overall, it's a bit nicer than the Morrison or the Ross Island, pedestrian-wise. The sidewalk isn't any wider, and the traffic isn't much better, and it's a long walk, but there are far more "oooh, cooool..." moments as you walk along. That's got to count for something. The best spots to stop and take photos or just enjoy the view have got to be at the bridge towers; the sidewalk jogs out a bit, and actually goes right through the tower via a cool arched passageway.

The north & south sides of the bridge are basically the same, except for the view. The south side has a nice view of downtown, the Burlington Northern rail bridge, and Mt. Hood.

The big question in my mind before I went was whether I could cross the street safely on the west side so I could cover both sides of the bridge. The answer to that is "yes", with a completely mundane and unscary crosswalk. It was kind of fun to press the crosswalk button and force a bunch of semis and dump trucks to stop for little old me. But not fun enough to do it twice.

The north side doesn't have as much of a river view looking downstream, unless you find the Toyota import terminal picturesque. But you can see Mt. St. Helens and Mt. Adams, and a tiny bit of Mt. Ranier if it's not too hazy out. And there's the shadow of the bridge on the river, which is rather fascinating. If you're as easily fascinated as I am, I mean.

You can't really talk about bike and pedestrian access on the bridge without mentioning the 2005 renovation of the bridge. This fixed decades of neglect and disrepair, but did little to improve bike & pedestrian access. The bike folks were understandably peeved about that, with some expressing their frustration in, uh, creative ways.

Unlike most bridges in town, the bridge is operated by ODOT instead of Multnomah County, I guess because it carries Highway 30 and handles a lot of important port-related truck traffic. Considering how rarely the state gets around to maintaining its bridges, the fact that they stuck with the status quo for the most part is a long term missed opportunity. On the other hand, the bike/ped-friendly alternative proposals involved making room for bike lanes by restriping the bridge down from four traffic lanes to two. Which I think was a bit unrealistic, given the sort of traffic the bridge carries. But, you know, what else could you do? Unless you actually make the sidewalks wider, finding space on the bridge is a zero-sum game. I suppose you could cantilever the sidewalks out further, but that would be awfully expensive, and that kind of alteration might run into trouble due to the bridge's historic designation.

In an earlier post, I mentioned my notion of adding a walkway to the Burlington Northern railroad bridge just south of the St. Johns, similar to what was done with the Steel Bridge a few years ago. A Portland Tribune article mentions another option I hadn't considered. Apparently there's a proposal floating around out there to build another bridge further downstream, around the Terminal 4 / Rivergate area. It'd connect industrial areas on both sides of the river and might siphon off a lot of the truck traffic currently using the St. Johns. At that point, the two-lane option on the St. Johns might become a little more viable. Plus by law (I think) the new bridge would have to have bike lanes too, in the unlikely event it's on the way to anywhere any cyclists want to go. Price tag, a mere $150M. So I suppose we'll get right on it as soon as we've replaced the Interstate Bridge and built a new MAX bridge downtown, and done something about the Sellwood while we're at it.

On the general topic of bridge improvements, there's a group out there that wants to light the bridge at night. Ooh, neato. That would be beautiful. And expensive, probably.

Regarding the obligatory "not dying" theme, there are two primary ways you could die on the St. Johns. There's getting hit, and there's falling off, and falling off is pretty unlikely. Ok, falling off accidentally is pretty unlikely, unless there's a huge gust of wind (which is possible), or maybe if you swoon over all the fabulous Art Deco goodness. As for falling off deliberately, I understand the St. Johns is rather popular for that, but I'm not really in a position to offer any useful advice on the subject.

The hazards are the usual ones -- the sidewalks are narrow, and traffic zooms by just a few feet away. The St. Johns gets a lot of truck traffic of all sorts: Semis, double trailers, dump trucks, cement mixers, you name it, it's whizzing by at high speed, just a few feet away. Additionally, there are a few spots where the bridge gets bouncy when a truck goes by. Which isn't fun.

Oh, and the bridge is really high up. I don't get heights anxiety very often, but there were a couple of twinges of it while crossing the bridge. Heights alone won't do it; it has to be heights plus the lack of anything sufficiently solid to hold on to. Hence I don't call it "fear of heights" or "acrophobia". That sounds kind of wimpy. Let's just say I'm a huge fan of solid rock, metal, and so forth. That sounds a lot more manly. Or whatever. The point of all of this is that there's a reason there aren't a lot of photos pointing straight down from the bridge. That would require looking straight down from the bridge, and after the first couple of attempts I filed that under "Don't Wanna".

So with the normal hazards out of the way, it's time for paranormal ones. I don't usually go for that sort of thing, but it turns out there's a ghost story attached to Cathedral Park, directly under the bridge. I figured I'd pass it along to liven things up a bit. It's not really that great of a ghost story, all things considered. It'd just be a sad crime story, but for the ghostly postscript to it. I'd like the story a lot more if supernatural vengeance was exacted at some point. But hey, that's how the ghost story goes. I don't write the stuff. I report, you decide. Or whatever.

If you'd like to see other, and generally better, photos than mine. Obviously there are many, many, many more besides these, but here's a selection.

• PortlandBridges
• Noble Viola ???
• Portland Ground
• Technodevil
• Our new mayor's website
• Amanda Fritz's blog
• Columbia River Images
• A site with some historic old photos of the bridge, some with the pre-WWII German navy ship Karlsruhe sailing beneath it. What was a German navy ship doing here back then?
• A couple of Flickr images I particularly liked.
• The Waymarking page about the bridge has a few more photos, plus survey marker info that I'm sure is quite useful if you're into that waymarking stuff, whatever it is.

The bridge also shows up on magnets, art prints, and (as all real Portlanders already know) on Bridgeport beer labels. The last bit is a little odd actually; Bridgeport's located in the Pearl, near the almost-as-photogenic Fremont Bridge, and as far as I know they've never been located anywhere near the St. Johns, but they went with it anyway. Go figure.

This whole bridge series is kind of a silly idea, the more I think about it. Just a few days before my incredible St. Johns adventure, the bridge was part of the huge Portland Bridge Pedal, in which tens of thousands of people biked or walked across it and most of the other bridges around town. Which rather puts a damper on my usual shtick about how weird and unusual it is to walk across the bridge. I actually considered signing up for the non-pedaling version of the bridge pedal, for the unusual opportunity to walk across the Fremont & Marquam, presumably without dying, but I didn't get to it. As I've mentioned before, I'm not much of a joiner, really, and I don't usually go for big group activities like that. Plus it involves getting up wayyy too early on a Sunday morning, which is another thing I'm not real big on. So maybe next year, or not. Also, bridges are one of those things that old men get all obsessive about. It's right up there with railroads and World War II, on the geez-o-dork-o-meter. Not being an oldster, or even a middle-agedster quite yet, I feel rather foolish undertaking a project of this sort. If you ever catch me getting all misty-eyed about steam engines, or WWII bombers, or ships in bottles, just go ahead and slap me silly. Just do it. You don't even have to warn me first, just freakin' slap away. It might help to explain yourself afterward, just to make sure I've gotten the point. It's not even a very ambitious project, quite honestly. It's not like I've taken up ultramarathoning, or I'm learning a new language, or we're moving to Portugal to take up cork farming. It's just something I blundered into to amuse myself in my non-copious free time, I guess. At least it's a self-limiting project. Unless I do the Bridge Pedal thing next year, with this post I've covered all the "interesting" Willamette River bridges in the greater Portland area. It's possible one or more of the remaining downtown bridges might become "interesting" later on. But I think I'm going to go ahead and declare Mission Accomplished on this baby regardless. I'm still not sure if I'm interested in Columbia River bridges, although there's only two of those. And there's also bridges over smaller rivers in the area, like the Clackamas, the Sandy, or the Tualatin. I've already got a photoset for one of those, but it was on my way back from the Oregon City Bridge, so I'm not sure that counts. So two cheers for Mission Accomplished! Yay! Or whatever.