”Mountain grog seller and river gambler, Generous Sport and border jackal, blackleg braggart and coonskin roisterer, Long Knives from Kentucky and hatchet-men from New York, bondsmen, brokers and bounty jumpers-right from the go it was a broker`s town and the brokers run it yet.”
-Nelson Algren, ”Chicago: City on the Make”
When Nelson Algren penned his little volume about our town`s penchant for the hustle, he knew what he was talking about. The profit motive was even behind the city`s original bridge. The span in question was built in 1831 as a private venture, its purpose being to let the blackleg braggarts and coonskin roisterers who lived on the west bank of the Chicago River`s North Branch cross over to the east side to patronize a certain bawdy saloon. That a bridge over ribald waters should have been the city`s first would have amused old Nelson.
Hundreds of bridges have since followed, for in addition to being a city on the make, Chicago is first and foremost a city on a moat. Other great cities of the world may have more romantic or historic bridges-Paris has its Pont Neuf, Florence its Ponte Vecchio, Lake Havasu City its London Bridge-but Chicago has a claim to fame of its own: It is the home of the movable bridge, that ingratiating genre of bridge that moves aside to make way for the barges of commerce and the long-masted schooners of the rich.
In this series of pages we pay tribute to Chicago`s movable bridges, prompted by the celebration this month of American Rivers Month and the local observance here by the Friends of the Chicago River.
There is much that can be said about Chicago bridges. For example:
– The City of Chicago has more movable bridges than any other city in the world. It has 52 of them, 43 of which are currently operable. (All but one of the others can be brought up to speed within a few months upon demand of the U. S. Coast Guard or Department of Defense.)
– Chicago is the father of the modern double-leaf trunnion bascule bridge, which is essentially a drawbridge whose two halves rotate up and down on a pair of horizontal shafts called trunnions. ”Bascule” is the French word for ”see-saw,” and that`s just what a bascule bridge does.
– The Columbus Drive Bridge, completed in 1982, is the second-longest bascule bridge in the world. At 269 feet in length, it is exceeded only by the 295-foot span across the Bay of Cadiz in Spain.
– Even though the Michigan Avenue Bridge always seems to be up, especially when you have an important appointment on the other side, the bridge only opened 185 times in 1988 for an average of less than 10 minutes a crack. It did not open at all in January, February or March, but opened some 30 times in the peak month of August.
– The most active bridge is at 106th Street on the Calumet River, which in 1987 was opened 5,805 times for a cumulative 37,252 minutes, or 621 hours. Since there are only 8,760 hours in a year, the bridge was opened about 7 percent of the time.
– The next most active bridge is at Kinzie Street on the river`s North Branch, and it rose and fell 3,100 times in 1988. The bridge gets such a workout because it has very low clearance of 15 feet and not only must be opened for the considerable volume of pleasure craft that use the North Branch but also for barge traffic carrying bulk goods such as sand, salt, gasoline and oil. These barges slip neatly underneath nearly all of the other bridges in town. (The Kinzie, incidentally, was the bridge where a cabdriver was killed in 1987 after a bridgetender, whom the city contends was drunk, allegedly raised the bridge while the cab was still on it to permit a barge and tug to pass, then lowered it again, crushing the taxi between the bridge and street.)
– Five operable bridges are never raised at all, including ones where Halsted Street, Division Street and Ogden Avenue intersect with the North Branch Canal. Of bridges that are opened, the least active major bridge is the Washington Street bridge on the South Branch, which opened only 48 times in 1987.
There. Aren`t you glad you know all that?
Chicago`s affair with the bridge actually dates back to the travels of Louis Joliet and Pere Jacques Marquette, who in 1673 set out to explore the western shore of Lake Michigan. They had heard from the Indians about a great river route connecting the Great Lakes to the Mississippi River, and they were intent on finding it. After making their way to the head of Green Bay, they canoed up the Fox River and down the Wisconsin River to the Mississippi but concluded that the route was too arduous to be the one the Indians had in mind.
Later, having paddled down the Mississippi as far as the Arkansas River, the pair turned back north and this time detoured along the Illinois River and the Des Plaines River until they came to Mud Lake, a huge swamp three miles west of the Checaugou River. This time they sensed that they had found the fabled great river route to the south, and Joliet wrote in his diary that the Checaugou portage would be a fine place to dig a ship canal.
Joliet`s recognition of the commercial potential of the portage was prophetic, and little more than a century later a settlement began to grow on the mouth of the Chicago River. By 1836, a year before Chicago was incorporated as a city, work began on Joliet`s canal connecting the Chicago and Illinois rivers, assuring the new community`s place as a trade and transportation crossroads.
At about this time, Chicago was a town of 4,179 citizens and 500 buildings on both sides of a bustling river. Getting across was a chore managed by ferryboat, and the importance of these conveyances is reflected in the fact that to this day, among the only people exempted by law from jury duty are ”constant ferryboatmen.”
Amazingly, there was at first strong resistance to building bridges. The shipping interests plying the waters in growing number wanted no interference with their navigation. And merchants on the south side of the river were fearful of losing trade to the warehouses that lined the north bank. Their meal ticket was a fleet of produce wagons that arrived every night from the south and the merchants wished to keep the wagoneers on the south side of the river to force them to trade there.
But the need for bridges could not be contained. The question was how to get pedestrians and vehicular traffic across the river without impeding shipping. A bridge such as the short-lived saloon walkway of 1831 was out of the question because it was immobile and would permit no ships of meaningful size to pass. The solution was a bridge that could move. In 1834 work began on Chicago`s first movable bridge, a rude 10-foot-wide wooden drawbridge at the foot of Dearborn Street that could be opened with chains to provide a 60-foot passage for cargo vessels.
The trouble was, the bridge kept getting stuck, once for a full two days. Residents came to hate it. The City`s Common Council ordered its removal in July of 1839, and legend has it that citizens chopped it down that night with axes before the council could change its mind.
The next year a proposal to build a new bridge at Clark Street was placed before the council. The proposal, opposed by the South Side and favored by the North, carried by a single vote, the mayor`s. Built at a cost of $3,000, most of it put up by North Siders, the bridge was a floating affair hinged to the bank and supported by a pontoon at the other end. It could be opened and closed with chains wound around capstans. By 1848, similar bridges had been built at Wells, Randolph and Kinzie Streets. But this time nature took a hand. Three days of heavy March rain in 1848 caused a swell of water that broke up the ice dam plugging the South Branch of the river. The flood roared downriver wielding ice floes like weapons, destroying all the bridges in its path, along with a number of ships at anchor.
Chicago was back to Square One. Over the next half-century the city was to experiment with a number of improved bridge designs. The first of these was the swing bridge, a type supported on a pier in the middle of the river, rotating on a turntable so that craft could pass on either side. The first swing bridge was built in 1856 at Rush Street for $48,000, but it collapsed just seven years later when the whistle from a passing boat spooked a herd of cattle, which stampeded to one end of the bridge, toppling it under their weight.
Although more swing bridges were built, the design contained an inherent flaw. The support pier took up too much room in the waterway, leaving insufficient space for large commercial vessels going around it. It was not unusual for vessels to accidently ram the pier, causing damage to themselves and the bridge.
New solutions were tried. There was the jackknife bridge, hinged at two places on each leaf and operating as clumsily as a folding chair. Next came vertical-lift bridges, which hoisted the bridge out of the way by means of an elevator on either bank. A working vertical-lift bridge, operated by Amtrak, still stands near Canal and 18th Streets. But vertical lift bridges had the drawback of being ugly.
A better design came from William Scherzer, whose rolling-lift bridge consisted of two leaves, each of which rocked back and forth on what resembled the runners of a rocking chair. The leaves disappeared into foundations dug into each bank, leaving an unobstructed passage for ships. The problem with Scherzer bridges was that they were unsightly and, at least in the case of the early ones, unstable when opened. But they clearly demonstrated the desirability of bridges of this general type. The Cermak Road Bridge, built in 1906, is the sole Scherzer rolling-lift bridge left in the city.
If the Scherzer bridge was an improvement over its predecessors, it was not the design that would make Chicago bridge engineers famous. It remained for the technology to take another stride. Around the turn of the century, city engineers undertook an exhaustive study of American and European bridge design and concluded that the double-leaf trunnion bascule type, which went Scherzer one better, was the bridge that most met Chicago`s needs. Beginning with the Cortland Street Bridge on the North Side, completed in 1902, all but one of the surviving 51 movable bridges built by the Division of Bridges and Viaducts have been of the trunnion bascule type. The bridge is so identified with the city that it has come to be known in international circles as the
”Chicago style.”
The beauty of the trunnion bascule bridge is that the two leaves are precisely balanced by stacks and stacks of iron or concrete counterweights sunk into a pit below street level. The weight of this ballast is matched so carefully to that of the leaves that only a low-horsepower motor, about the size of a Volkswagen engine, is needed to raise thousands of tons of steel. Yet the bridge can be raised to its full vertical height in less than a minute. The Dearborn Street Bridge, for example, has leaves that weigh 3.5 million pounds each, offset by a honeycomb of 12-inch 455-pound iron cubes dangling below. A hundred-horsepower motor on each side is all that is necessary to tip the balance between the two. It is a balance so fine that whenever the bridge is repainted, rebalancing is required.
The Michigan Avenue Bridge`s leaves weigh even more, tipping the scales at 6.7 million pounds each. This is because the bridge has double decks, the top one managing Michigan Avenue traffic, the bottom one a conduit to lower Wacker Drive. But despite its massive weight, the bridge can be opened in 30 to 45 seconds.
The Michigan Avenue Bridge, completed in 1920, is of interest for esthetic reasons as well. It was a crowning achievement of architect Edward Bennett, a colleague of Daniel Burnham`s, who was obsessed with designing a bridge as beautiful and monumental as those of Paris. It is said to resemble the Alexander III Bridge built for the 1900 Paris World`s Fair. Sleek of line, it lacks the superstructure that protrudes above the roadway in many other bascule bridges.
Each of its four pylons, which house the bridge`s operational machinery, is adorned with an urn and historical bas-relief. The north pylons, gifts to the city from William Wrigley Jr., were created by James Earle Fraser.
The northwest pylon, known as ”Pioneers,” uses fur trader John Kinzie to represent the city`s early settlers. Kinzie, the area`s first white settler, owned property on that exact site in 1804. The northeast pylon,
”Discoverers,” commemorates Joliet and Marquette, although Fraser mistakenly depicted Marquette, a Jesuit priest, in the garb of a Franciscan monk.
Money for the south pylons, designed by sculptor Henry Herring, came from the Ferguson Monument Fund. The pylons stand near the original site of Ft. Dearborn, a federal emplacement built in 1804 under the Treaty of Greenville, signed by the Indians of the Ohio Territory after their defeat in 1792 by Gen. ”Mad” Anthony Wayne. The treaty specifically noted the strategic importance of the Chicago portage and set aside a six-square-mile area at the river`s mouth as a possession of the United States. Because of this strategic importance, the British continued to incite the Indians to attack the fort and early Chicago settlers, and during the War of 1812, about two-thirds of the settlers and garrison of the fort were massacred.
Herring commemorated this event with his southwest pylon, entitled,
”Defense.” His southeast pylon, named ”Regeneration,” honors the rebuilding of the city that took place after the Great Fire of 1871.
The Michigan Avenue Bridge, by the way, is due for an $18-million rehab job, to be performed in two stages in the near future-possibly as early as next year-pending funding approval. ”We have to take the old deck off and put a new one on,” says City Engineer Louis Koncza. ”We`ll do the northbound half one summer and the southbound the next.”
The period from 1916 to 1930 was a heyday of trunnion bascule bridge construction in Chicago, witnessing creation of bridges at Lake Street (1916), Madison Street (1922), Wells Street (1922), Adams Street (1927), Clark Street (1929) and Wabash Avenue (1930).
The Columbus Drive Bridge is not the last one built-one at Randolph Street, constructed in 1984, has that honor-but it is certainly the highest attainment of the Chicago bridge-builder`s art. It cost $33 million to build, is 111 feet wide to accommodate six lanes of traffic and boasts tapering box girders instead of the traditional deep-riveted trusses found on other city bridges.
Another design variation sets the Columbus Drive Bridge apart: It is set back from water`s edge by several feet so that pedestrians can stroll along the bank directly beneath the bridge. Eventually, when the huge Cityfront Center complex along the mouth of the river is completed, there will be a park along the bank that will stretch from Michigan Avenue all the way to the lakefront.
Chicago is a city of bridges as much as is Venice or London, although we seldom stop to think of it. Only when bridges get stuck-as they chronically used to do each time a jinxed 560-foot freighter from Detroit called the Medusa Challenger paid a call on Chicago in the 1970s-do we become aware of how important these structures are to the fabric of our lives. (The Medusa has shifted its entry point to the far South Side.) These snafus are a relatively rare occurrence when one considers that in 1987 there were a total of 27,855 bridge openings, and 27,725 of those were conducted without delays.
Incidentally, there are fewer bridge openings with each passing year. In 1982, there were 30,845. The reason for this is better organization and diminished river traffic. ”Through cooperation with boat owners and boat-yard owners, we`ve been able to group boats so that they now come through mostly on weekends in bunches of 20 to 30,” says Ted Kaczkowski, the city`s chief bridge engineer. Most of these vessels are pleasure craft. Commercial use of the main branch of the river has declined over the years, in part because heavy industry has shifted away and in part because most ocean-going vessels now enter at the Port of Chicago in Calumet Harbor. What cargo vessels still navigate the main branch are chiefly barges that require no bridge lifting or larger vessels that come through at night.
The 27,700-some-odd closings each year are handled by a crew of only 90 bridge tenders, including six women. Only the Kinzie Avenue and Cermak Road Bridges and the bridges at Calumet Harbor are manned by full-time, 24-hour-a- day crews. Roving bridgetenders handle the rest. What in fact happens is that tenders travel in two packs of four each. Crew No. 1 raises the first bridge in a boat`s path. Then, while Crew No. 2 raises the next bridge up or downriver, Crew No. 1 gets into a car and leapfrogs ahead to a third bridge, and so on. It has a Keystone Cops element to it, but it saves the city money. Chicago, by the way, certainly must be the only city in the world to have a bridge named after a newspaper columnist, that distinction belonging to the Wabash Avenue Bridge, now renamed the Irv Kupcinet Bridge. It makes you wonder if the city didn`t miss the boat with the span at Damen Avenue on the South Branch. Is it too late to rename it the Damen Trunnion bridge? –
