Bridge Day #2: The Fremont Bridge

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Bridge number two of Bridge Day is one of the ones built during my lifetime. As a matter of fact, I got to watch it on TV ... had to, I'd say. I was living in Silverton at the time.

The Fremont Bridge was the final link in the inner city freeway loop that is formed by I-5 and I-405. It is a tied-arch bridge, and made news because the center of the span was fabricated in California, assembled just downriver on Swan Island, and barged from Swan Island to the worksite, where it was hoisted into place using 32 giant hydraulic jacks. 

They telecast the beginning of the lift early one evening in March 1973. I don't know how long it took but the allotted program time wasn't near enough long, I'm certain.

A schoolkid at the time, I made numerous drawings on looseleaf. It became something of an obsession.

It's almost 400 feet up to the top of that arc from the river. It also has a nest of peregrine falcons.

A View of the Portland Harbor From Mock's Crest, 2009

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About twelve years ago, me and the Brown Eyed Girl were enjoying a mid-summer day on the lip of the bluff that is crowned by the University of Portland - a summit known as Mock's Crest.

It's almost a perfect semicircle. It can be pretty easily identified if you find North Willamette Blvd west of North Greeley Avenue; it clings to most, but not all, of the cliff's top. The remainder is the UP property.

It offers a wonderful view of Mock's Bottom and the lagoon that, at one time, was the man channel of the Willamette River back wen Swan Island was still an island and, not coincidentally, part of Swan Island itself. 

The picturesque sweep of Portland from many angles is what makes me come back to this sort of space again and again and again.

The water is the Swan Island Lagoon and the opposite bank is the north side of the Swan Island peninsula. The Island has gone through many changes; originally a true island, with the main river channel on the north side, it was levelled and graded and connected to the bank with fill and became Portland's airport during the 2nd quarter of the 20th Century. An ill-starred thing, this, as a mere few year after going into operation, aircraft needed landing strips that were bigger and longer than it could provide. The international airport moved out to the northeast side of town, along the Columbia, and Swan Island became Portland's industrial and marine terminal heart. 

In the distance, the Fremont Bridge and downtown Portland, about four miles away from this POV, complete the tableau. An incomparable profile.

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. 

Moody Night Shot of the Fremont Bridge, 2007

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For our last throwback of the day, here's a view, lens flare through plastic optics and all, of the Fremont Bridge at night, taken on a March night in 2007.

This photo is the perfect backdrop for hard-boiled Portland-style detective tales, retro-future atmospheres, and anything that just needs a moody, after-dark, bridge-lit, fourteen-year-old patina. Contact us for details.

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.

The Saint Johns Bridge: Coming Back To Town

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Got another snap before we left the parking area on Bridge Avenue: as I said earlier, the west end of the bridge runs right into the hillside. At that end, the roadway makes a T-intersection with Bridge Avenue which allows a good viewpoint for a straight-on view up the road.

The pavement makes it easy to snap this POV without having to walk out into traffic to do it and really puts the gothic arch details of the tower into viewable aspect, letting them be the star.

This corner of Portland is quite far out from the city center, nearly seven miles out. Views south and east from the roadway, both NW Bridge Avenue and NW St Helens Road, reveal the working harbor of Portland, the lowest few miles of the Willamette River - wide, cool, and mighty.

That lift span bridge in the middle distance is Portland's hidden bridge, which doesn't even have a name really, and carries the railroad main line north into the cut through the North Portland peninsula and to Vancouver and points north.

Though the area on the west side of the river does have a rather descriptive name: Willbridge. 
 

NW Saint Helens Road travels between industry and tank farms on the left as you're inbound to city center, and on the right, the towering, forested hills of Forest Park. Old, careworn industrial lots and orphaned gas stations predominate on the right hand side of the road as well, with a handful of homes (including two rather incongruous vintage fourplexes) scattered amongst, and a few avenues intersecting numbered in the NW 60s running back only about a block before dead-ending into the hill.

Very soon on the end of this district, at the cross street of NW Kittridge Avenue, the main road swerves and assumes the name NW Yeon Avenue, Saint Helens Road assuming the role of the old highway and straightlining amongst the industrial district toward the center of town. It's then, more than three miles out, that you notice the great arch of the Fremont Bridge, one of the other iconic river landmarks.

It's somewhat intimidating when you get to the point illustrated here:

... and you're still more than a mile away.

The Fremont Bridge from Kaiser South Interstate

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It's not hard to get a bridge photo in Portland. The challenge is to find unexpected settings.

The Fremont Bridge is an architectural marvel and one of those things one only needs look at to know this is Portland. It is north of the city center, for those of you who aren't of here, and both the east and the west ends are in industrial areas (which are getting less industrial by the day, given that this is Portland, but they still wear that heritage proudly.

The Kaiser medical complex at the top of the hill on North Interstate Avenue faces that area and provides some vantages that look more blue-collar worker than the effete population that seems to be washing in like a tide.

The growing (!) city in the background, but in the foreground, the old, grubby, working, Albina rail yard side of old Portland which, while the character of the work seems to have changed a little, still looks the way it did thirty years ago, only if you don't look too close.

There are artist's studios down there now. I'm not against artists and studios, aspiring to be an actual one with one myself, but it's just kind of a dislocative thing.

There's a cement plant down there. It was going full-throat when we were there, as see above.

Of course, as above, if you pull in close enough, you see the encroachment of the Beautiful New People, with that signature crop of the time, the building crane. They're in full bloom lately.

The Union Pacific yard house's chimney, still more or less unchanged over the ages, holds sentinel duty against a wind of change that threatens to push it over, but who knows? In ten years, it'll be the centerpiece of some lovely lifestyle community maybe.