Beautiful Bridges: Sweepstake Winners or Sweepaway MenaceBy Jane Holtz Kay Across the nation, the bridge is soaring back to the top of the planning agenda. New and restored bridges have begun to emerge as showboat designs, simple structures, or widened routes. Sometimes they are "signature spans," displaying the art of engineer-designers like Santiago Calatrava. Sometimes aging infrastructure refurbished has been refurbished to great effect. Less appealing, giant new spans grab urban turf, hardtop greenfields and create sprawl. A case in point for the bridge is Boston's celebrity structure: the cable-stayed Bunker Hill/Zakim Bridge, a striking Downtown image created by the high-style Swiss engineer Menn.
As engineering joins today's star-chitecture, camera-wielding tourists snap at this and other new images by name designers, like architect Frank Gehry's stainless steel pedestrian bridge on Chicago's downtown lakefront. Newest icons In planning, as in architecture and engineering, one can't deny the eternal and contemporary veneration of elegant bridge building. Defying nature, if not gravity, contemporary designers, especially in Europe, are creating icons for countless cities. Their models include mid-19th century American artist-engineers like John Roebling, designer of the Brooklyn Bridged, and Orthmar Ammann, the creator of the George Washington Bridge, who came to America exactly 100 years ago. The productions of booth straddled the vast span of New York rivers to create an urban web and daring inspiration for the water-wrapped metropolis. The hope in many part s of the country is that a new bridge will become a tourist attraction, especially when lit by the current glow of stars like Calatrava. A new work by the Spanish architect, the designer of New York's PATH terminal at the World Trade Center, opened recently in the northern California city of Redding. Designed to link the Turtle Bay Exploration Park with the entrance to the city's Sacramento River Trail system, the winged Sunday shape-with its tall projecting pylon and cable stays that hold it to the ground-is an attraction in itself, though with some doubters.
In Chicago, a serpentine, stainless steel-clad pedestrian bridge by Gehry Partners of Los Angeles is part of the $475 million Millennium Park project. The bridge crosses Columbus Drive between Gehry's new music pavilion and the eastern portion of Grant Park, adjacent to Lake Michigan. Park designers hope the bridge will also muffle street noise during performances. The $12 million structure is due to open in July. Preservation still dicey In some cases, the new wave of bridge sentiment has promoted preservation of older structures. The recent cosmetic fixup of Boston's historic Longfellow Bridge, aka the Salt and Pepper bridge, and could inspire repairs to the fleet of battered bridges along the Charles River, says Britt Lundgren of the Charles River Conservancy. The conservancy's ongoing bridge lighting program elsewhere on the Charles could also help.
Still it's a struggle to save historic bridges. Splendid Depression-era structures built by the Civilian Conservation Corps are under assault. So are bridges Along New York's Merritt Parkway. In Skowhegan, Maine, the fate of a handsome stone arch bridge on the Kennebec River-unhappily threatened by a bypass-hangs in limbo. Out with the old Critics are also unhappy with an $849 million project to widen the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and to build a parallel bridge over Puget Sound. State transportation officials say the new bridge, which would be completed in 2008, is needed to ease rush-hour congestion from Tacoma to the Olympic Peninsula. The existing Tacoma Narrows bridge will be repaired. All the nation's new bridges are not greeted with applause, however. Their widened road surfaces have consequences for good and ill, as planners and communities know. The new lanes' pricey, traffic-generating routes and the sprawling development they breed appall many. The language that labels many of our nation's bridges as "functionally obsolete" is faulty, says Linda Bailey, policy analyst for the Surface Transportation Policy Project (STPP). Bailey labels the terminology obfuscating-- "saying that we want it to do something that it isn't" (i.e. obsolete) rather than that it's "structurally deficient," meaning reparable. A case in point is Washington, D.C.'s much-contested expansion of the Woodrow Wilson highway, route 395 where the DOT uses that exact functionally obsolete" phrase, she says. Instead, planners at STPP argue for repair and rail, not highway-bringing bridges. "Investments in road and bridge-repair create 9 percent more jobs per dollar than building new roads or bridges," they insist, while switching funds to public transportation jumps job creation by 19 percent more than building new road and bridge projects. Not only costs but technological arguments can follow in the wake of new bridge building. In San Francisco, a new two-mile elevated eastern span of the Bay Bridge now underway, planned to ease both traffic and tremors, is causing conflict in the city of quakes. Using supposedly cutting-edge techniques, the engineers changed the threading of the structure to protect against such trembles, provoking protests from other engineers with grave doubts. Meanwhile, other constituencies question whether the structure will reduce traffic or, once again, prove the old maxim: "If you build it they will come." No question, planners and community leaders recognize that the nation's infrastructure is crumbling, and traffic growing. The Transportation Research Board (TRB) lists 23,244 deficient bridges in the National Highway System with California, Massachusetts, New York and Texas highest among them; plus the deterioration of 13,459 local or non-national highway systems, lead by Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Iowa. "Now is the time for caretaking." Princeton's David P. Billington, architecture and engineering professor and author told an interviewer. The challenge "has shifted from continuous building to maintaining," he observed, calling the New York Port Authority's re-doing of the George Washington Bridge "exemplary." Billington exults in The Art of Structure: A Swiss Legacy (Yale Press) in his new book and applauds old bridges "what I'm trying to do is stimulate the proper repair and way we think about things being built," he says. He deplores the thousands built blandly and need needlessly so and applauds bridge builders as artists working within a budget, like Menn's Severin Bridge at Annapolis? . Meanwhile, Amtrak's crumbling infrastructure of bridges lacks the funds for maintenance and Trainriders' newsletter reminds readers that "two antique moveable-bridge spans in Connecticut are in danger of failure, threatening service between Boston and New York)."
A look at the bridge project web site is overwhelming: "Missouri DOT needs a new bridge"... Key Largo is suspicious of "four-laning" the Jewfish Creek bridge...Pasadena celebrates the Colorado street bridge fundraisers...Monterey county advertises for a Moss Landing bridge which "crosses to safety"...Even a D.C. covered bridge got close to $60,000 in terrorist protection, labeled "security enhancement." In many states, today's bridges can become tourist attractions beyond their transportation needs and an economic plus to planners who see the glow of star designers like Santiago Calatrava. Well-known abroad and the designer of New York's PATH terminal at the World Trade Center, Calatrava won a commission to do a touted U.S. bridge sculpture in the Northern California town of Redding. Designed to link portions of the Turtle Bay Exploration Park and serve as downtown draw and entrance for Redding's Sacramento River Trail system, his winged sundial shape with its tall projecting pylon and cable stays is intended as an attraction but reads as rather overwhelming to some. Touted for its accessibility to the public and sensitivity to "salmon-spawning," the bridgemaking included paying environmental attention to crossing the riverbed without disturbing its flow "so aquatic life will be undisturbed," according to the firm. An update of what critic Montgomery Schuyler called an "aerial bow," Calatrava's 700-foot long, 23 foot wide structure with its 2l7 foot mast, his first American bridge, has already attracted attention in The New York Times (February 20, 2004) as it projects high into the sky in this remote part of Northern California. Today's bridge-building mania can also promote preservation and fixup of older structures. Still it's a struggle to save such historic bridges and sites. Depression era bridges, splendid artifacts built by the Civilian Conservation Corps or lining the Merritt Parkway, fall as highwaymen widen their roads and lead. Community opposition to transportation planners grows in Skowhegan, Maine's, where citizens feared a bypass would undo a handsome stone arch bridge); or Missouri where DOT planners look to send the Boone Bridge across the Missouri River for "future traffic needs." Whatever the opposition, planners expect that the bridge boom and concurrent highway-widening will continue as structures deteriorate and traffic accelerates. The congestion from mainland Tacoma to the Olympic Peninsula over the Puget Sound persuaded transportation planners to adopt an $849-million project to build a second suspension bridge and repair the old one to ease traffic. The Washington State DOT project, due in 2008, has caused controversy. The new bridge will run one-way automobile-only traffic, parallel to the existing Tacoma Narrows bridge. This current bridge, itself a replacement to the collapsing "Galloping Gerties" of 1940, will be repaired. According to transportation consultant Preston Schiller of Bellingham, the new bridge "is improperly sited and represents a lost opportunity for planning around it." He says it would lead to "Bridgelock," the water-based version of road gridlock. Still others fret that this water-based version of "if you build it..." could undermine the region's current effort to seek alternatives to the automobile." In Milwaukee, for example, the Sixth Street viaduct, a 1908 structure known as the "gateway to downtown Milwaukee," was in bad shape. According to the Wisconsin DOT, the cost of maintaining the state's first vehicular cable-stayed bridge was determined to be more than the cost of building a new bridge over the Milwaukee River. Down it came. The new, $50 million structure, by HNTB's Milwaukee office, will emulate its predecessor's cable-stay shape. The result, say the designers, will help to revitalize a brownfield area, transforming it with a new Harley-Davidson museum and office development. Planners of Miami's 80-year-old Southwest Second Avenue Bridge took the same route. When the leaves of the bascule bridge would not easily accommodate large vessels on their way to and from the Miami River Port, they chose to replace it with a new, $43.5 million bridge. The old structure, which its builders had called an "engineering marvel," was fated for destruction because it didn't meet standards for landmark designation, says Miami planner David Korros. "There are a lot of bridges," says Cathy Owens, in charge of studying environmental planning issues connected with six aging bridges for Florida's DOT. Each of the six has a different setting and different needs, she says. The result is a taxing, "case by case" study, she goes on. The firm designing the new bridge is Edwards and Kelcey of Miami. Language problem Why does refurbishment get so little respect? The problem is the official language that labels many of our nation's bridges as "functionally obsolete," says Linda Bailey, a policy analyst for the Surface Transportation Policy Project, the Washington-based group that advocates for more diverse means of transportation than the single-occupancy vehicle. The label dooms the bridge from the start. The District of Columbia is a case in point. The U.S. Department of Transportation uses just that phrase-"functionally obsolete"-in its argument for replacing the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, which carries traffic on Interstate 495/95 between Maryland and Viridian, now underway. Planners as Stop argued the old bridges should be repaired Renovation makes more economic sense than new construction , they say "Investments in road and bridge repair create nine percent more jobs per dollar than building new roads or bridges," STPP advocates insist. Moreover, new bridges have their own troubles In San Francisco, where a new two-mile eastern span of the Bay Bridge is under construction, engineers have raised questions about earthquake safety. Others wonder whether the new bridge will simply worsen already the incredible traffic jams. No question, planners and community leaders recognize that the nation's infrastructure is crumbling, and traffic growing. The Transportation Research Board lists 23,244 deficient bridges in the national highway system, with California, Massachusetts, New York, and Texas highest among them. Add to that the deterioration of 13,459 local or non-national highway system bridges; the numbers are highest in Texas, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Iowa. "Now is the time for caretaking," Princeton civil engineering professor David P. Billington told a television interviewer. The challenge " has shifted from continuous building to maintaining," he observes in a phone conversation. Billington applauds the New York Port Authority's "exemplary" rendering of the George Washington Bridge while deploring the thousands of blandly built new bridges throughout the U.S. Will today's bridge builders and planners respond to the aging structures by flattening or restoring? As the bridge boom lopes across the nation, observers wonder. Will transportation agencies fatten the waistlines of multi-lane highways or poise handsome newcomers, Frisbee-like across the vast seaways to lure tourists and feed the economic boom? Both of the above, appears to be the answer. This article appeared in the transportation issue of Planning magazine, May 2004.
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In planning, as in architecture and engineering, one can't deny the eternal and contemporary veneration for elegant bridge-building. Defying nature, if not gravity, bridgemakers, especially in Europe, have created icons for countless cities lately. Americans are now taking up where their mid-nineteenth century's artist-engineers left off. The Brooklyn Bridge's John Roebling and the George Washington Bridge's Orthmar Ammann who arrived exactly 100 years ago this year, straddled the vast span of New York rivers to create both an urban web and a ring of inspiration to the water-wrapped metropolis. The U.S. "bridgescape" (yes, there is a book by that name) is good business and bridgemakers have become celebrities.