NOT A BRIDGE TOO FAR
The Research Paper
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In 1844, the resources of the United States territory of Oregon were being discovered (Stein 15). By claiming the territory, the country had inherited an incredible supply of trees. Oregon's legacy is all about trees. The pioneers who settled here found that timber and wood must become their greatest industry and export.
The Tualatin Valley was one of the first sectors of Oregon to be primed for logging. Situated nearby was the Willamette River, which connected to the Columbia in the north and provided access to the sea and to vessels traveling upriver.
There were a number of townships along the river to which cut lumber could be taken and rafted or shipped away for trade. Oregon City, far down on the east shore of the Willamette, was the first city to be founded in the area, in the year 1829. However, Oregon City proved itself a difficult location for river traffic. Gravel bars at the head of the tributary Clackamas River complicated navigation to the town. These gravel bars also made the city of West Linn, which had access to the Tualatin Valley via the small Tualatin River, an undesirable spot for a trading port and center of shipping.
This made the export of lumber most problematic. The Tualatin River was the only connection between the valley and the navigable Willamette, but the Clackamas gravel bars prevented both lumber rafts and cargo vessels from passing up the river. It was not until 1844 that this situation would change.
A site higher on the west bank of the Willamette was settled by a former Boston resident, Asa Lovejoy, and William Overton. Lovejoy and Overton created a clearing around their claims in 1843, and the next year Overton's claim was bought by Francis Pettygrove (Stein 15).
The Pettygrove-Lovejoy coin toss is a legend in the Portland area. They became leading citizens in the small congregation of settlers that formed around the clearing. Thus, when moves were taken to incorporate the town, it lay between them to think of a name. As the story is told, Asa Lovejoy preferred the title of Boston for their growing village. Pettygrove, however, was from Portland, Maine, and suggested this to be the name of their city. In a coin toss, fate proved Portland to be the winner.
Pettygrove's Portland was at a good place on the river for ship traffic. It was before both the Clackamas gravel bars and the straits of Ross Island. But it had no connection to the lumber in the Tualatin Valley. This made it no better equipped to handle trade than tiny Linnton in the north, or Milwaukie with its great turning-basin, both of which competed against Portland to become the state's northern center of trade. Pettygrove changed that.
Pettygrove spearheaded the construction of the Canyon Road across and into the Tualatin Valley. As timber was in ready supply, the Canyon Road was lined with wooden planks to provide a surface that would not mire wagon wheels in mud (very troublesome). A bronze placard in the South Park Blocks before the Portland Art Museum denotes the head of what became known as the Great Plank Road.
Thus, Portland became the shipping center of Oregon. It now had connections to both the outside world and the resources of the Valley. It began to grow.
The city lived through the timber boom, and the gold rush, and the introduction of fast-moving steamboats and railroads. It became the seat of a new post office in 1869 (the building is still here). It built its first streetcar line in 1871 (Stein 40), and established its wide City Park. It survived devastating fires in 1872 and 1873. By the centennial of the United States, the city was home to more than 7,000 souls (Stein 21).
Although it now had civilized improvements and good connections to the world, Portland was still a frontier city; the home to miners and sailors and cowboys and longshoremen. The city grew a seedy element. The massive shipping traffic gave rise to the practice of shanghaiing, or the kidnapping of men to crew ships as enslaved sailors. The criminal force in Portland was so intrepid (and so endearing) that it arranged the construction of a series of underground tunnels to connect the city's many brothels and saloons to the waterfront, so that drugged sailors could more easily be conducted to the vessels. Portland was, in truth, a most unusual place; the proud city that built great lighted archways over its streets to celebrate its railroads, and the rowdy shanghai town, home to the tavern with the world's longest bar. A strange place indeed.
Portland's divisions were readily apparent in the 1880s. The city was split in two by the river, with small but populous Portland commanding the west bank, and wide East Portland and Albina on the other. Toll-charging ferryboats provided the only means from the East to the West.
On April 11, 1887, this changed, when the first bridge was built across the Willamette River. It was a wooden structure, with trusses that sat on pylons high above the water (Stein 48). The bridge was designed to allow river traffic to continue. One span was made of iron, constructed so that it was able to rotate, clearing the way for tall ships and steamers to pass by. This first bridge made its connection to the land at Morrison Street, and thus it took that name. The street had been named after John L. Morrison, one of Oregon's founders and the first man to build a house on the dirty lane that became one of the busiest in the Portland of 1887 (Wortman 34).
The 1887 Morrison Bridge was operated by the Pacific Bridge Company, which collected tolls from those who crossed it. The tolls were similar to the fares issued by the ferry companies, which allowed the boats to compete with the bridge. Nevertheless, the bridge was a singular landmark; it was the longest bridge beyond the Mississippi River (Oregon Journal).
The mechanism which allowed the bridge to open for passing ships was one of the first ever used in the New World. A bridge as large as the Morrison could only be opened by rotating one of its segments. In Europe, smaller movable bridges had been pioneered, including double-leaf and single-leaf bascule mechanisms. A single-leaf bascule is essentially a drawbridge, which is opened by means of a counterweight that is applied at the base of the leaf. A double-leaf bascule consists of a pair of these drawbridges placed together, with a pair of counterweight devices.
However, the movement of bascule counterweights was prohibitive on large bridges. The machinery to operate a bascule draw did not exist at the time. In fact, the Morrison Bridge used little machinery at all, beyond simple machines and gearing. Much of the work was done by two men, who (in good weather) would push open the rotating span. A bad-weather job required four men (Oregon Journal).
At night, the big bridge was somewhat frightening, especially in the fog. The bridge's simplified design did not include many of today's safety features, such as gates or warning signs. Thus, it was possible for an unwary bridge-crosser to stumble off the end of the bridge when it was open, or to be caught on the rotating draw and have to wait for it to close. Paradoxically, an especially confused pedestrian caught on the draw-section might even find themselves going back across the bridge in the same direction. The rotating span was not always facing the same way. Later, when streetcars were run on the bridge, it was also possible for one to fall off in much the same way as a night-blinded pedestrian. The headlines, "Man Falls Off Bridge" or "Trolley Swallowed By River" were not uncommon to local newspapers (Oregon Journal).
Only one year after the Morrison Bridge was built, it was joined by yet another competitor, the Steel Bridge. The presence of Oregon Steel Mills made steel the preferred construction material for the bridge, and since it was heretofore unusual to build a bridge out of steel, the bridge became known as "the" Steel Bridge for that reason (Wortman 19). The Steel Bridge provided the first railroad connection across the river, serving both trains and normal traffic on two decks. Like the Morrison, it opened on a swing.
Following this, there was the Madison Street Bridge, which crossed the river to the immediate south of the Morrison. Then, in 1894, the Burnside Bridge, north of the Morrison, was built. At this time, the Willamette River was spanned by four rotating bridges. And shortly thereafter, the Morrison Bridge left the hands of the Pacific Bridge Company.
On July 3, 1895, the City of Portland concluded purchasing the Morrison Bridge. The next day, the Fourth of July, saw the end of the tolls. Now anyone could cross the river for free.
In ten years, the first bridge was replaced with the second. The wooden trusses that served the original Morrison were torn out, although the concrete foundations were left. These supported the second bridge, which was opened in 1905.
The second Morrison Bridge was markedly similar to the first, with a rotating span. This bridge was all metal, and it was mechanized. Also, it had closing gates which prevented motor vehicles, pedestrians, and streetcars from toppling off of the edge.
For a period of time when streetcars were used on the bridge, the second Morrison drew the electrical power it needed to operate directly from the trolley wires (Snyder 169). The rotating span actually employed a pair of recycling streetcar motors, which worked the gears that cranked the section open.
To request operation of the bridge, a boat would blow a long call on its whistle, followed by three short bursts. The bridge operator, working from an octagonal cabin atop the rotating span, would return this call, and gate operators would exit from their watch-houses to stop traffic and shut the safety gates (Snyder 169). It would then be up to the bridge operator to determine when the bridge's opening should actually take place, so to keep traffic delay to a minimum. The closer the boat is to the bridge when it is opened means the sooner the bridge can be closed again. When the operator is ready, a final bell is sounded and the opening process begins (Snyder 170).
The second Morrison Bridge saw the city through its toughest years, and also watched as its neighboring bridges were torn down and replaced. The Morrison's rebuilding heralded a new era of bridge building in Portland, as the city grew. First to come after the new Morrison were a set of three moving railroad bridges: two swing bridges crossing the Columbia River at Hayden Island, and another swing bridge across the Willamette near Linnton. These bridges were built, owned, and operated by the Burlington Northern Railway, which referred to them via numbers and gave them no names.
After these, the Madison Street Bridge (which had already been replaced once after burning down in 1900) was removed and a new kind of bridge was installed. This new bridge was known as the Hawthorne Bridge, named after Dr. J. C. Hawthorne, the founder of the Oregon Hospital for the Insane (what irony). Its 1910 design and construction were carried out by the international firm Waddell & Harrington, which employed a vertical lift span instead of a rotation mechanism (Wortman 40). This method involved large counterweights suspended from the top of metal towers, which would lower and raise a segment of the bridge via pulley action.
A second vertical lift bridge replaced the original Steel Bridge in 1912, and the year after that another new lifting method was employed with the new Broadway Bridge just north of the Steel. This bridge used a double-leaf bascule system, which lifted open a pair of truss-sections to allow ships to pass through.
The Broadway Bridge was essentially a sign of things to come. The next movable bridges built across the Willamette would both be double-leaf bascule bridges. When it was decided that the Burnside Bridge was no longer suitable for the heavy traffic it was receiving, the bridge was taken apart and elements of its construction were distributed around the region to serve as smaller highway bridges, and as components of the Sellwood Bridge below Ross Island (Wortman 30).
The designer of the next Burnside was a Czechoslovakian immigrant, Gustav Lindenthal, who chose to modify slightly the Broadway Bridge's lifting mechanism for repetition in the Burnside (Wortman 30). This method involved no trusses on the lift sections, and tremendous counterweights were hidden inside giant wells inside of the bridge's superstructure. A pair of towers on either side of the span served as headquarters for the operators. This counterweight-well method was first invented by Joseph B. Strauss, who had also developed the famous Golden Gate suspension bridge in San Francisco, CA, and who had also built the Longview-Rainier Bridge across the Columbia River.
During the Great Depression and the Second World War, there were no bridges built over the Willamette River. But after the war ended and the nation's economy recovered, the city began to realize that the Morrison Bridge was getting old. Hot weather and high water were both capable of disabling the bridge. On warm days, the bridge's metalwork would expand and freeze up, causing the bridge to be entirely immobile. When the Willamette was swelled from snow runoff or from rain, the old bridge's delicate electrical connections would periodically get wet and short out, leaving it with the energy to open (Snyder 169). This was especially difficult due to the fact that, since the Morrison Bridge was the lowest of the city's bridges (that is, its deck was the closest to the river level), it had to open the most.
The situation was compounded during severe flooding in 1948. In the North along the Columbia River, the city of Vanport, one of the fastest-growing townships in the state, was caught with a broken river-dike and swept away, killing many and destroying thousands of homes. The Vanport Flood also bloated the Willamette so that it swamped the low-decked Morrison entirely and rendered it completely inoperable. It took two weeks for the water to recede, and a month to get the aging bridge back into operation (Stein 166).
Motions to replace the bridge immediately surfaced, but it was not until 1954 that a referendum of the area's voters approved a $12,000,000 bond for the construction of a new Morrison Bridge (Oregon Journal). The design for the new bridge was implemented to include room for an incredible amount of traffic. The drawing board saw a roadway, eighty feet wide, carrying six lanes of automobile traffic, and two sidewalks.
The double-leaf bascule system in use on the Burnside Bridge had proved itself fast and effective by now, and so it was chosen to be duplicated in the new Morrison. The third Morrison Bridge is practically a mirror image of the Burnside, except bigger, and lacking in character.
During the installation of the counterweight wells, which were even larger than those of the Burnside Bridge, the end approaches of the Morrison Bridge had to be modified to accommodate construction. Due to its importance in the center of the city, the old Morrison Bridge was left in use almost to the last moment before the third bridge was opened, as its successor was constructed right next to it.
As the third bridge was under construction, the commissioners of Multnomah County, which now was responsible for the bridge, launched an attempt to collect on the old bridge. Sale offers were extended all around the state, including a proposal to float the old bridge in pieces to Milwaukie, and provide a direct automobile link between Milwaukie and Lake Oswego (Oregon Journal). These fell through. The old Morrison Bridge was going to be dismantled and demolished.
The third Morrison Bridge was designed by the Sverdrup & Parcel Company of St. Louis, MO. Prior to building bridges, Leif Sverdrup, the senior partner, had been in charge of constructing airfields and runways in the Pacific Islands during the Second World War. After the war, Sverdrup was the builder of the Vandenburg missile range in California (Wortman 35). Sverdrup's aerospace leanings soon became apparent to those who saw the new bridge being built. Unlike the operating towers on the Burnside Bridge, the towers of the Morrison were very much similar to aircraft control towers. All in all, the third Morrison was designed expressly to serve as a bridge, and not an aesthetic piece.
The late 1950s was an era of freeways and automobiles. Interstate highways were constructed across the country, and as the Morrison Bridge was going up, so was Interstate 5 on the east bank of the river. Aesthetics in modern structures was being sacrificed for brute efficiency. Even as this new bridge neared completion, work started on the Marquam Bridge, the tremendous highway span carrying the Interstate over the river. Local commissioners even forecasted that another freeway bridge would be completed by 1972, the Fremont Bridge (Oregon Journal). The Highway Department planned well in advance.
Until the Marquam Bridge came along several years later, the new Morrison would be the subject of the most intense highway traffic. This made it extremely important, in the eyes of both the city governments and the citizens of Portland.
When the Morrison Bridge was finally completed in 1958, its opening was celebrated with a huge public gathering on Saturday, May 24 of that year. For the first time, the bridge's bascule leaves were closed, and a stage was set up on the apex of the bridge. The swing-span of the old Morrison Bridge was opened up, and left in the open position until work began to remove it.
At 9:30 in the morning, the event began. Bands from Wilson and Benson High Schools, and from the local Musicians' Union, played throughout the morning. Irv Jacobson, the owner of the venerable Morrison Bridge Auto Parking lot, offered free parking to 1,000 cars. Local politicians stumped with speeches. Terry Schrunk, the Mayor, mentioned, "They have ordained that progress will continue." A commissioner by the name of Al Brown made the statement that "today we do not come to you with empty hands. We bring you a beautiful bridge." (Oregon Journal)
Military fighter jets ran stunts overhead as fireboats sprayed water plumes into the air. At 11:00 AM, the wives of the county commissioners performed the signature cutting of the ribbon. Later that day, the stage and bandstands were removed, and by 1:00, the third Morrison Bridge was in business. The first car across was that of someone named Jack Schelter, who was bemused to find that the local newspaper had looked up his license record (Oregon Journal).
With the third Morrison Bridge now in use, construction turned to deconstruction as crews moved in to demolish the second bridge. The metalwork was taken apart piece by piece and junked, and when it was all gone, the concrete foundation piers that had served since 1887 were dynamited into oblivion (Oregon Journal). A reporter for the Oregon Journal, Jack Ostergren, wrote the epitaph for the old bridge, in the exact words: "Goodby, rest in pieces."
Newspapers and engineers boasted of the new bridge's statistics. It incorporated 8,750 feet of approach ramps, and crossed 760 feet over the river. The bascule sections were operated by 900-ton counterweights, made of concrete and run by 17 tons of machinery and gears (Oregon Journal). With this heavy equipment, the bridge could open and close in three minutes: The fastest bridge on water.
Bibliography:
1. Snyder, Eugene E. Portland Potpourri. Portland: Binford & Mort, 1991.
2. Stein, Harry, et al. Portland: A Pictorial History. Virginia Beach: Donning, 1980.
3. Wortman, Sharon. The Portland Bridge Book. Portland: Oregon Historical Society Publishing, 2001.
4. Dodds, Linda, & Buan, Carol. Portland, Then and Now. San Diego: Thunder Bay Press, 2001.
5: Oregon Journal 21 May 1958.
6: Oregon Journal 22 May 1958.
7: Oregon Journal 24 May 1958.
8: Ostergren, Jack. "Goodby, Rest In Pieces." Oregon Journal 25 May 1958.
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