Bridge Day #1: The Broadway Bridge

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Today is Bridge Day for no other reason than I had three bridge pictures to post.

We at The ZehnKatzen Times do not plan on making this a repeating thing, although I live in a city that has bridges and I adore them, they'll sneak in here from time to time.

None of them are pierless, I'm afraid.

From last week, then, a bridge I don't have so many pictures of: the Broadway Bridge. It's a Rall-type bascule (Rall after the man who devised this particular method, and bascule meaning drawbridge with a leaf or two leaves as the draw span) that was built in 1913. It connects Broadway on the east to Broadway on the west, and that precedence is important because Broadway, in Portland, was born on the east side and only became a west side street after this bridge connected it to Seventh Street North and the name was extended. 

Until the Great Renaming, it was known as Broadway south of Burnside, Broadway North north of Burnside, and East Broadway east of the Willamette.

The connection, which completes a stringing of Broadway through four of the city's now-six address areas, makes a most unique route of Broadway, technically both a Street (east of the river) and an Avenue (west of the river). As I understand it, though, the correct rubric is simply Broadway, no Ave or St, though there are some older blades on the east side that may still say NE Broadway St, and are being superseded by the new-look street blade design.

The design of the lift mechanism makes for some slow bridge lifts. Multnomah County's page on the Rall design cites it as the slowest lift of all the bridges, with average lift times of ten minutes.

Having been caught on the Broadway during some of those lifts, I can confirm. It takes forever. If you have to be somewhere and time is tight, use another bridge, if you can.

You'll thank me later for this advice, I'm sure.

Fremont, Broadway, and Louis Dreyfus Dock

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This is basically an angle of what you see if you took my viewpoint on 3848 and turned 180 degrees.

The red truss is a part of the Broadway Bridge, and the great arch beyond is an irregular visitor to this block, the nearly-iconic Fremont Bridge. The Louis Dreyfus grain elevator is there on the left, and beyond the bridge the boutique condo district that NW Portland has become gives way to what remains of the working port district on the Willamette's right bank.

The grittiness of the area lives on as an echo, but that's getting attenuated as the money comes in. And so it goes. 

Willamette River Close-up at the Steel Bridge

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The zooming in to make the bridge frame the glimpses of city beyond is always a bit of an irresistible compulsion to me, as is bumping the color up a little.

It's the struggle between fidelity to reality and fidelity to memory; the colors may be more vivid than they were in reality, but they're exactly as vivid as they are in memory. And the satisfaction in devolving the shapes in the girders and the structures they frame by disconnecting them from what they connect to in the greater sense, that makes them make more sense, and making them a more abstract thing is something I also cannot turn away from, and it's satisfying

.  For information's sake, the red truss over the river beyond the supports to the Steel is part of the Broadway Bridge, and the small blocky apartments was once known as McCormick Pier, though it may well have changed its name. Everything down in that area of town has. 

Even the graffiti seems to support the artistic view of the place.

Four Portland Bridges In One (Picture): 2018 Throwback

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Other cities have more bridges, other cities have fewer but more spectacular bridges, but Portland, with a mere seven traffic crossings over its modest yet muscular dividing river has a rep as Bridgetown which extends well beyond its limit.

Maybe because, in the gestalt way, Portland's bridges draw the line between number, function, design, and majesty to accidentally arrive in a certain picturesque sweet spot. The modern lines of the Morrison Bridge are sublime; the antiqueness of the Burnside, the rusticness of the Steel, are, to me, more memorable than the majesty of the suspension spans linking New York boroughs. Even the Saint Johns, despite its quaintness, emanates a combination of poise and elegance that the Golden Gate Bridge can't match. 

But that's me; I, even in the evolved Portland of today, am ever the PDX-chauvinist. Home-town pride and all that.

There's another more practical niftiness about the bend of the Willamette through the dead center of the Rose City; it affords unique angles that allow me to combine more than one bridge most attractively into one shot. For instance, if you situate yourself in the proper place, about 2/3rds of the way east over the Burnside from downtown, you get this:

Four bridges in this shot: in the distance, the arch of the Fremont; next nearer, the red trusses of the Broadway; one more in, the prehistoric Steel, and the balustrade of the one I'm standing on here, the Burnside. Through the gaps in that balustrade you see a car cruising along a ramp from the Banfield Freeway westbound to I-5 along the river southbound; if you look carefully between the supports of the Steel you see a bulk ship standing by to either unload or go; and on the right peeks out the Louis-Dreyfus grain dock elevators.

There are probably other river scenes in other river cities where you can combine nearby elements for an interesting view, but my heart tells me they can't really compete with this even before I've looked at them. 

Interestingly, despite the preponderance of 2010-2013 throwbacks from the now-decommissioned Kodak EasyShare C813, this was actually taken in 2018 according to the EXIF data, so it isn't a throwback ... more of a gentle shoveback.

Two Bridges, Five Days Ago

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In the missive previous I mentioned our inbound and outbound travel. Two bridges were involved:

The Broadway Bridge, here seen from N Interstate Avenue back of the old Memorial Coliseum:

And the transport outbound was the venerable Steel Bridge. The smoke is not as evident in this, but the drabness of what is usually a fairly colorful shot should be obvious.

 

[pdx] The Broadway Bridge: Christo Wasn't Here

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There is some renovation going on on the Broadway Bridge, the exact nature of which I've not bothered to keep up on, but on our way home out of NW Portland, The Wife™ decided to have fun with it, so we took NW Broadway toward the East Side.

Here's what the Broadway Bridge looked like today:

We're goin' undercover.