Great River Bridge, Westfield, MA

Great River Bridge(s)

When the giant camelback truss bridge that crossed the Westfield River started getting creaky, Westfield could have just junked it and replaced it with a standard girder and concrete bridge and life would have gone on. Instead, the city doubled down, built a duplicate bridge just a bit down river, closed the old bridge and started bringing it back to code (the old bridge is foremost in the picture above; the new bridge is behind it).

The old Great River Bridge was even more worse off than was thought, requiring more years and more millions of dollars to finish the job. Westfield could have just stuck with the new bridge at that point but they decided once more to go all in, dug up part of Union Ave and turned the land between the bridges into a beautiful park. At one end, they raised a clock tower (with a REALLY LOUD chime). At the other end, they raised the existing railroad tracks to keep them usable and high enough for trucks to clear.

Park between the bridges, current railroad bridge crossing left to right in the background

Westfield's nickname is "Whip City". It used to be famous for its buggy whips. Hate to be a buggy whip maker when everyone's driving cars goes the saying, and Westfield is now just a suburb to Springfield. In colonial times, Westfield was the western-most settlement in Massachusetts. Now it's home to Pilgrim Candles, and candle shops line Elm Street.

Upriver of the Great River Bridges is an old, abandoned truss railroad bridge. There's nothing stopping anyone from walking right up to it; there's a concrete path leading right past it, actually. While I was taking pictures, a teenager skated up, picked up his skateboard and crossed the river on the bridge.

I figured this was something I'd have to try. We had a railroad bridge back in Linwood that crossed some river connecting Whitin and Linwood Ponds, and it was a rite of passage to cross it. Mind this was an active railroad (and still is, I think). Some of the boys would swing under the bridge and hide in the trusses, but it was enough for me to just cross it without falling into the river or being hit by a train. There was no reason I couldn't just skip over this one.

I couldn't do it. The ties were rounded from wear and the gaps between them wider than I expected. I could walk on those four inch beams, of course. I have been training for that my entire life. My dad and I used to walk along the tracks, and he'd walk on the rails and I'd try to do that, too. I still sometimes walk on the curbs and stuff, narrower than these beams.

I started crossing the bridge, got about halfway through the first span and with the water below me and the lack of anything to fall against (except air) on the sides... I lost my nerve and came back. I felt so ashamed of myself. Ashamed, but without any new broken bones.

You know you're getting old when...

Return of the Comstock Covered Bridge, Part IV

Last October, I took a picture of the Comstock Covered Bridge in East Hampton for the first time from this angle. It was just the beam supports for the deck, nothing more. Four months later, it's a bridge. It was open! A group of guys were fishing for trout in the poorly named Salmon River below it, laughing and having a great time. Moms and Dads and kids were running through from one side to the other. An older couple with a service dog came down a path, went over the bridge. The bridge wasn't necessary for traffic, and I doubt it really does much for tourism -- it's something for the locals to enjoy. It brings the community together just as it brings East Hampton and Colchester together.

Inside the Comstock Covered Bridge

A friend asked, "why bridges"? I told him it might as well be something, but I've been thinking about the answer to that question all day. I was in Westfield, Massachusetts, hunting a bridge I'd read about in a comment on a news post about construction on the Willimansett Bridge. I was twenty feet above a river on an abandoned railroad bridge. If I wanted to cross it, I had the choice of running across 100' of a four inch beam, or chancing the wide gaps between rotting ties. I'll write more about that later.

But, that is why. That is the reason. My kids are grown and I'm divorced. There is nothing I need to buy that I can't buy in town or over the internet. Nobody wants me to go with them anywhere. There's no real reason to leave town. There's no reason to leave the apartment. Most days, there's no reason to even leave my room.

When the cops impounded my car nearly three years ago and I was forced to take bus, bicycle or walk everywhere until last summer when I got a car again, I was devastated for awhile. But then, I didn't really need a car because I never went anywhere, anyway. I started taking my bike to work. That's when I found out that that bridge I'd been driving over every day, the Bulkeley Bridge, was historic and beautiful. That's when I realized that I'd been living in Manchester for years and had never even been downtown, unless I'd gotten lost.

Beams from the original bridge were used in its reconstruction

Since I started bridge hunting, I've been all over the state. I've climbed mountains in the Berkshires, dipped my fingers in Long Island Sound, seen a hundred small towns each with their own beauty, walked the Appalachian Trail, gone on a cruise on the Connecticut ... and started enjoying my life and looking forward to my next day trip, the next small town, the next mountain top, the next bridge.

First few years I worked at my current employer, I didn't take vacations because where would I go? Just stay home? Watch television? Forget the world?

I'd rather choose life.

Willimansett Bridge, Holyoke-Chicopee, MA

So excited! It looks like tomorrow's Connecticut River Cruise is a go! It's going to be in the morning, but not early enough to get some dramatic sunrise on the river pictures. Those will wait until it's warmer.

Anyway. Today's bridge is the Willimansett Bridge in Holyoke, Massachusetts, just north of Springfield, where I was going for more shots of the Memorial Bridge. Springfield's Memorial Bridge, like Hartford's Bulkeley Bridge, will get a post when my photography gets good enough to do it justice. Practice!

The Willimansett Bridge is a four span truss bridge over the Connecticut River. Built in 1891, this old bridge is currently closed to traffic while it undergoes an expensive renovation. Over 15,000 cars are said to have crossed this daily when it was open, which is frankly astonishing. Now drivers have to go a couple miles downriver to take Route 391 across.

The Route 391 bridge is boring, but it is definitely the best vantage from which to see the Willimansett Bridge -- but only at highway speeds from your car, as there is no pedestrian access on that bridge. There is, however, pedestrian access on the Willimansett.

It looks as if you could probably climb down the north bank on the Chicopee side of the bridge and get a better view, but by this time I was already quite a long way from my car and getting nervous about it, as I'd accidentally left my phone on the front seat.

Holyoke has a canal running alongside the Connecticut which is crossed by several other bridges. The Water Street bridge, above, crosses one outlet of the canal as it heads to a dam and into the river. You can see a bridge crossing the dam itself in the background.

This short, three span arch bridge takes Cabot Street over the canal and up to the Willimansett Bridge. With the canal crossed by all these low bridges, I'm not sure what the function of the canal IS. Maybe irrigation?

The Willimansett Bridge in the background, covered by tarp while workers work inside it. Pedestrian access is to the left.

On the Willimansett. I still had my camera with the bad lens at this point, and my phone with its excellent camera was (as mentioned above) back in the car, so I couldn't take pictures that looked toward the west (or the bridge), where the sun was shining, without having the image ruined by huge flaws. Gotta get that fixed, because the G12 is a really good camera and it cost me a lot of money. Even broken, it takes these fantastic pictures with incredible color.

Truss bridges aren't particularly rare around here, but every one is unique, all of them beautiful, and most of them were the lifeblood of their communities. I can only imagine how proud the people who lived in Holyoke were of their bridge when it was built 121 years ago.

Willimansett Bridge ca 1893

Comstock Covered Bridge, East Hampton-Colchester, CT

January, 2012

The Comstock Bridge, or the Comstock Covered Bridge or simply just "Covered Bridge" bridges the Salmon River and connects East Hampton and Colchester. It is one of Connecticut's three remaining covered bridges -- the other two being the Bulls Bridge in Kent and the Covered Bridge in West Cornwall.

Increasingly desperate measures were necessary to keep the bridge from falling into the river. A few years back, massive metal beams were bolted to the sides of the bridge, but that only delayed the inevitable. The state chose to rebuild the bridge, using as much of the wood from the original bridge as they could. Construction is nearly done and should be fully complete in February, 2012.

Ryan Blessing of the Norwich Bulletin writes:

The 90-foot bridge over the Salmon River and north of Route 16 was closed in March of 2009 so work could begin on the $1.1 million project, according to the state Department of Transportation. It is one of only three covered bridges remaining in Connecticut, the DOT said. “It’s a very unique and historical bridge,” DOT spokesman Kevin Nursick said. “There’s been a bridge at that spot since the 1700s.”

I first visited the Comstock Bridge at the beginning of October and was a little surprised (and a little disappointed) to find the bridge mostly taken apart.

October, 2011

I'd heard that Hurricane Irene had torn out some bridges and assumed (wrongly) that the Comstock Bridge had been one of her victims.

Turns out it was entirely intentional. I'd really wanted to visit the bridge; in fact I really wanted to ride my bike down to Colchester and cross that bridge.

No luck.

There's just not a lot of information about the bridge construction easily available online. I did some digging in the Connecticut Department of Transportaton's website, and finally had some answers. It was being rebuilt. Construction would be finished by the end of November, 2011.

(Oh, here's an article on nearby East Haddam's website about the reconstruction of the bridge).

November, 2011

I duly returned to the bridge in late November, hoping to take a walk over it, but it still wasn't done. There had been a lot of progress. The beam and truss frame was up and the roof was beginning to come together.

The foliage was beautiful. Next year, the finished bridge is going to be a perfect picture.

There are a lot of great places from which to photograph this bridge. Route 16 runs right past the bridge. Park in the parking lot just as you turn from Route 16 onto Comstock Bridge Road, then walk back up Route 16 to where it crosses the Salmon River, look upstream and take the shot (the first shot was taken from this point). If you walk up Comstock Bridge Road a little, you can hop over the guardrail and head upriver to get a great shot looking back at the bridge -- the third picture was done from here.

There's a trail used by fishermen on the Colchester side of the bridge that gives great views of the bridge (and beneath) for awhile before a bend in the river hides the bridge (second picture was from this vantage point).

The annual Salmon River 5.5 Mile Run starts and finishes at the Comstock Bridge. I might just have to run in it this year.

Steve of CTMuseamQuest.com seems to have dug up pretty much everything there is to know about the bridge as of 2007, before they started dismantling it. By the time I heard of the bridge, it was already being re-assembled. There's luck for you. I went down to Colchester lured by the pictures on Google Street View and was surprised to see just beams and part of a floor. I'd have been utterly shocked if it weren't there at all.