It’s a bridge so ugly that only the engineer who designed it could love it.
For nearly a century, it served in relative obscurity, spanning the Sanitary and Ship Canal in a swampy area called Isle a la Cache just downwind from the coal pile for Commonwealth Edison Co.’s Romeoville power plant and upwind from an oil refinery.
Designed in 1898, when horses and buggies were the principal vehicles, it was reduced to one lane for truck traffic in its later years.
Despite numerous repairs, including the replacement of its original wooden deck with one of steel in 1920 (it was repaired and updated twice in the intervening years), by 1990 it had grown so decrepit it was closed to all traffic .
But because it outlived all other bridges of its kind in Illinois, it received the state designation of “historically significant,” thus becoming eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places.
The state designation “offers the bridge protection similar to the national register,” said Bruce Hodgdon, public information naturalist with the Forest Preserve District of Will County. The designation by the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency prevents its demolition.
That meant southwest suburban Romeoville has had to spend $1.3 million to move all 215 tons of it to make room for a new bridge over the canal at 135th Street. The old structure’s new home is on Will County’s Centennial Trail, a recreational pathway parallel to the canal, about 600 yards away from its original site.
There its tired members will have a chance to provide another century of service to hikers and bikers.
“I’ve torn down a lot of old bridges before, but this is the first one I’ve moved and put back together,” said Robert Wackerlin, an ironworker from Waterman, Ill., on the Taft Contracting Co. crew reassembling it.
What makes a 97-year-old bridge so special, particularly when it isn’t even one of a kind? The old 135th Streetbridge is one of three nearly identical structures built in 1899 over the canal there and at Willow Springs and Lemont Roads to the northeast. The other two were replaced more than a decade ago.
To an engineer or industrial archaeologist, the 135th Street bridge is special because it is a double-span, steel-through truss, swing bridge. Call it a swing bridge, for short.
Though it hasn’t done any swinging in years and will not do any on the nature trail, its survival makes it something of a celebrity among bridges in metropolitan Chicago, the mecca of movable bridges in the U.S.
That distinction dates from the city’s legacy as a busy canal and lake port in the 19th Century, when schooners, steamers and canal boats were in constant conflict with railroads, which were in constant conflict with pedestrians, buggies and drays.
To solve the railroad problem, Chicago elevated them on fills above street level over 20 years beginning about 1890. Because of Chicago’s persistent drainage problems beginning in the 1850s, downtown Chicago was raised by four to six feet above its original grade by jacking up the buildings, installing new foundations and filling in around them. (That task still didn’t solve the city’s river clearance problem, however.)
The obvious solution from the beginning was to build movable bridges that could be opened to let vessels pass and closed to let the people cross. Over the years various agencies in the area have built drawbridges, swing bridges, pontoon bridges, vertical-lift bridges, jackknife bridges, rolling-lift bridges and bascule bridges.
As early as 1834–just three years after the London Bridge (which now makes its home in Lake Havasu, Ariz.) was completed–Chicago built its first movable bridge, a 10-foot-wide wooden drawbridge at Dearborn Street that could be opened by chains to allow a 60-foot channel. It never worked very well and was removed five years later.
Next came a pontoon bridge at Clark Street, but a flood washed it out, and three others like it, in 1848. Beginning in 1856 Chicago tried swing bridges at Rush Street on piers in the middle of the river. They could be swung parallel to the river to allow ships to pass.
But the supporting pier took up too much of the river channel and often was hit by the ships.
As iron and steel replaced wood in the last half of the 19th Century, along came giant vertical-lift bridges, like the one still used by the railroads at 18th Street south of Union Station.
Chicago discovered the solution in 1902 at Cortland Street on the North Side, when it built its first double-leaf trunnion bascule bridge–the type that now dominates the Chicago River crossings. The two equal sections are each supported by a trunnion, or large steel rod, that enables them to rotate, raising the spans.
The Metropolitan Sanitary District, which was digging the Sanitary and Ship Canal to replace the Illinois-Michigan Canal in the waning years of the 19th Century settled on a swing bridge that rotated on a turret on one of its banks.
The longest span, at 204 feet, on the canal crossed the canal and was counterbalanced by about 90 tons of steel and concrete on the shorter, 98-foot span. To let towboats pass, the bridge was swung over the bank.
The state originally proposed cutting the 135th Street bridge into five sections to move. “We eyeballed it and decided we could do it in two (sections),” said John Bianchi, operating vice president of Taft. “After all, we moved that 727 into the Museum of Science and Industry,” he added, referring to company’s role in mounting the retired United Airlines jetliner on display there. The company also erected the Ferris Wheel on Navy Pier and built the Splash Mountain ride at Walt Disney World. “We had never moved a bridge before,” he added.
The company cut the bridge in two, jacked it up, put aircraft dollies under it and towed it with an Army surplus tank retriever over a newly graded road.
“It was a lot like moving a house, but bigger,” he said.
It sounds simple enough, but Bianchi had to be careful. Bridges in 1899, like those built today, weren’t designed to be dragged across the countryside.
Like many truss bridges of its day, the deck of the 135th Street bridge was held rigid from above by an overhead truss superstructure connected to the deck with lattice steel beams and bars at 34 critical points by four-inch steel pins. Such pin-connected bridges are susceptible to catastrophic failures. The Silver Bridge at Point Pleasant, W. Va., for example, collapsed into the Ohio River without warning in 1967, killing 46 people.
“We had to put in a lot of bracing because the bridge was under tension when we began breaking it apart, but was under compression when we were moving it,” said Bianchi. Stated another way, the deck was supported by the superstructure when it spanned the canal, but once placed on dollies, the 34 pins supported the superstructure and deck– something they weren’t designed to do.
Despite the challenge, Bianchi and his crew managed without incident to nurse the bridge to its new site and weld it back together.
The final step will be to dig a new marsh under the old bridge so it will once again span water.
The old bridge is expected to be open to the public this fall, but construction of the new bridge will block one end of the path.
