Chicago, which loves the charming steel drawbridges that dot the city but hates the bottlenecks they sometimes cause, will soon have a dramatic new span that will ease passage over the Chicago River at North Avenue.
Intent on alleviating one of the North Side’s maddening traffic chokeholds, city officials are set to scrap one of its trademark movable bridges, once a necessity in a city with bustling river commerce.
The 99-year-old, two-lane red steel bridge over the river’s North Branch will be replaced by a four-lane suspension and cable-stay bridge, the first of its kind in the city, said Cheri Heramb, the Chicago Department of Transportation’s acting commissioner.
The new bridge will feature four 45-foot-tall, slender lit towers tethering the cables supporting the deck. City officials said the new bridge’s design will open up spectacular views of the skyline that are somewhat obstructed by the hefty beams of the existing bridge.
“The purpose and need of the project was to open up this road to two lanes of traffic in either direction,” said John Yonan, the project manager. “The skyline in the background is a very important facet that we took into this design.”
Construction of a temporary bridge just south of the old one will allow North Avenue to remain open and is scheduled to start Monday. The old bridge will likely be dismantled at the end of the summer. The $21.4 million project is expected to be completed in fall of 2007.
The existing bridge is one of the famed Chicago-style trunnion bascule bridges. The leaves are suspended on axles with counterweights–bascule means seesaw in French–and the steel trusses are noted for their curved profile. Since the mid-1990s the city has replaced two similar bridges along the North Branch of the river, said Brian Steele, a Transportation Department spokesman.
The city’s first trunnion bascule bridge was built in 1902 on Cortland Street, also on the North Branch. That structure, which is still operating, is an official city landmark.
Trunnion bascule bridges came to the city several years after architect William Scherzer had introduced a related type of bridge, the rolling lift bridge, over the Chicago River at Van Buren Street.
Scherzer was hoping to get a foothold in the bridge-building business in the booming industrial city at the turn of the last century, but his design was eclipsed by the trunnion bascule models.
With each bridge that was built, the design was further improved–the trusses were refined and the lifting and dropping mechanisms were hidden from plain sight.
The city’s bridges have long been celebrated, including being prominently featured in United Airlines advertising and gracing the cover of a collection of essays by Chicago icon Studs Terkel, “Division Street: America.”
Over the last 30 years, the city has slowly replaced several of the bascules with fixed-span bridges. There are 36 other operable bridges of their kind in the city, Steele said.
At the turn of the 20th Century, moving bridges helped balance the conflicting demands of horse and pedestrian traffic on the city’s streets with busy ship traffic hauling lumber and other goods to the factories on the Chicago River.
But the bridge on North Avenue hasn’t been lifted since 1972. Stan Kaderbek, who served as the city’s chief bridge engineer from 1993 to 2003, said movable bridges are difficult to maintain, particularly because there hasn’t been much reason to lift many of them for the last 30 years.
Still, he said it is difficult not to be nostalgic about the old bridges.
“They are as much a part of Chicago as the Water Tower,” Kaderbek said. “The bridges give the city a unique feel. Chicago wouldn’t be Chicago without the movable bridges.”
Steele said officials tried to identify another city that would take the historic North Avenue bridge but couldn’t find any takers.
“We were looking to give this to any entity that was willing to move it and put it to its intended use,” Steele said. “The mechanism that lifts the bridge is outdated, so getting anyone to take it on was difficult.”
With only one lane of traffic in either direction, the bridge has outlived its utility for an area with a mix of retail, industry and residences that attracts suffocating vehicular traffic. These days most of the river traffic is limited to people paddling kayaks for exercise.
“I can’t emphasize how important this bridge is,” Ald. Ted Matlak (32nd) said of the new bridge.
“This is a … bridge for horses and wagons. When this bridge is expanded, not only is it going to look good, it’s going to function a lot better.”
Jonathan Fine, president of Preservation Chicago, acknowledged that the old bridge couldn’t support the crush of traffic that floods the area. The city estimates 40,000 vehicles pass over the bridge every day.
But Fine said he had hoped the bridge could be salvaged.
“There is no question that North Avenue needs to be widened,” Fine said.
“But we would have liked to see the bridge preserved somehow. This is a historical bridge that helped create the character of the city.”
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amadhani@tribune.com
