Furthermore: Where the Headlines Take You

Bridges

Last week, both the Oregonian and the Portland Tribune featured stories about the possibilities for the future of the Sellwood Bridge. The current bridge is old, un-beloved, and in poor enough shape that buses and heavy trucks aren't allowed to cross it — but there is incredible controversy about what the best replacement would look like.  Maybe while you're considering which Sellwood Bridge improvement plan you'll support, you want to take a little meander through local bridge history?  If so, read on!

The Library of Congress' Built in America brings together photographs, drawings, and historical and technical data about buildings, structures and landscapes across the United States — showcasing remarkable as well as everyday examples. The site includes pictures of and information about a lot of bridges and bridge construction projects, including the Sellwood Bridge and other highlights of Portland architecture and engineering. I like pictures just as much as the next person, but these photographs and drawings are really fascinating. They show the bridges as technical and engineering masterpieces, as objects of beauty, and as complicated tools for human transportation.

If you're yearning for more about Portland's bridges, you need Sharon Wood Wortman's Portland Bridge Book. Nearly every particle of information about the river bridges between Vancouver and Oregon City is recorded here, accompanied by an astonishing range of photographs and technical drawings. Reading the book, you'll learn that the Sellwood Bridge was the first to be built without streetcar tracks, that the original Morrison bridge (built in 1887) was the first over the Willamette, and that the two halves of the Interstate Bridge over the Columbia were built separately — the northbound one in 1917 and the southbound one in 1958. But useful data aside, you might just find yourself enjoying The Portland Bridge Book for its illustrations. They include: scenic images of bridges and their surrounds for the artistically inclined; diagrams of counterweights and other machinery for the technically minded; and antique photographs of bridges under construction for the history buffs. (There are three editions of this book, all of them are wonderful, but the third edition, published in 2006, is completely revised and has considerably more information.)

The Portland area doesn't have a monopoly on bridges — rivers and marshy spots are major geographical features of the Pacific Northwest and where roads cross water, bridges are required. We have thousands. The Oregon State Transportation Department's Bridge Section is responsible for almost 2,700 bridges across the state, many of them much-loved local landmarks. Perhaps the most famous are state bridge engineer Conde B. McCullough's graceful concrete and steel bridges — the Oregon City Bridge is one of McCullough's designs, as are several famed bridges along Highway 101 on the Oregon coast. You can read more about McCullough, his life and career, and the bridges he built in Elegant Arches, Soaring Spans: C.B. McCullough, Oregon's Master Bridge Builder — biographer Robert B. Hadlow provides an intriguing narrative of the development of modern highway bridge engineering, and Oregon history and politics.