Some people say building bridges is the most important thing in the world.
And they are correct.
But for me, the most important thing is getting across them safely once they’re built.
I’ve been crossing them all my life, for better or worse.
My Portland pick is the Hawthorne Bridge.
I crossed it twice a day for years.
First I lived on the Westside and worked on the Eastside.
Then I lived on the Eastside and worked on the Westside.
I never got it down to living and working on the same side, which makes the Hawthorne my ‘Most Crossed Bridge.’
In 1980 the pedestrian walkway was made of wood that was rotting in place.
It was okay riding my bike, but walking it felt like I might drop into the Willamette with my next step.
Rotting wood was replaced by metal sheets that warped in the heat, or may have been warped from the start.
The bike ride had the feel of a swooping carnival attraction.
Eventually the city figured it out. Now it’s cement, level, and even.
Over and back, day after day without end, felt like a carnival.
Why a carnival? Before my Portland commute I rode the Broad Street Line subway in Philadelphia.
The RR was my New York train.
I looked around back then and saw faces used to the ordeal, the drudgery of the whole thing.
Not me. I saw it for the carnival ride it was, like It’s A Small World in Disneyland.
I saw my first Hit and Run accident on the Hawthorne that sent a pedestrian cartwheeling up in the air, land with a thump, then get revived enough to try and fight the police and EMT’s on the scene.
I saw an accident on the inside structure where a driver was thrown from their car and skidded across the steel grate on their knees. Raw knees.
Sometimes the river ran high, sometimes low.
Rising from the ashes of the original Madison Bridge (which was destroyed in a 1902 fire), the Hawthorne Bridge
Built in 1910, the Hawthorne Bridge is the oldest vertical lift bridge still in operation in America. The busiest bicycle transit bridge in the city, it connects downtown to the Eastbank Esplanade and Springwater on the Willamette trails.
In 1998, the city funded a $22 million upgrade, including a new coat of nontoxic paint and wider sidewalks, making it the busiest bicycle transit bridge in the city.
The Hawthorne became even better for pedestrians and cyclists in 2001 when it was connected to the Eastbank Esplanade and Springwater Corridor on the Willamette trails.
I’d heard a rumor of huge sturgeon lurking around the bridge’s foundation.
Has anyone seen people fishing from the old ferries that crossed the river?
North Bend Bridge Over Coos Bay
This the competition for ‘most crossed bridge of a lifetime,’ the North Bend Bridge.
Despite being built in a time where bridges often had built-up beams with lacing and lattice on the members, this bridge was built of solid steel members, drawing the eye to the appearance of the bridge as a whole, rather than detailed built-up parts of the bridge.
Virginia Bridge and Iron Company of Roanoke, Virginia was the general contractor for the bridge. The American Bridge Company of New York fabricated the steel for the bridge.
Like everyone who crossed this bridge before me, and everyone after, this was the way out of town.
Get on Hwy 101 north, turn right for Hwy 38 up the Umpqua River, then I-5 north or south to the rest of the world.
Turns out it was a big world out there.
I rode a motorcycle across the bridge going 70 mph on a Honda 100 with a front wheel shimmy.
The bridge was part of training runs during wrestling season.
One evening it was caught in the tail end of a wind storm, some called it a hurricane, and we still ran it.
Steve Prefontaine crossed the North Bend Bridge on his training runs to Horsfall Beach, which is nice memory of a local legend.
Sometimes I ask myself if crossing that bridge was the right decision.
These days I’m less adventurous.
We cut firewood under the bridge to finance wrestling trips to national tournaments.
If Coach Abraham asked you to cut wood, it meant you were on the right track.
We jousted with driftwood poles under the bridge. (Hey Mark)
We raced our cars across huge mud puddles under the bridge, which was how I discovered holes in my floorboard.
The only bridge memory from Philadelphia is crossing the Walt Whitman Bridge over the Delaware River on the way to Fort Dix on a weekly supple run.
No memory of a bridge in Brooklyn because the subway went under the East River to Manhattan and the Brooklyn Bridge was out of the way.
And I wasn’t a tourist.
Bridging The Present To The Future
I’m not the first blogger, the first observant writer, to see a problem brewing.
I was a freshman in college from ’73-’74 when Watergate bubbled over.
Six years later Ronald Reagan was elected on the promise of ending the Iranian hostage crisis.
Almost from the moment Iran free the U.S. hostages in 1981 just minutes after President Ronald Reagan took the oath of office, there have been suspicions about a deal between the Reagan campaign and Iran.