The Bridges of Bridgeport: Congress Street Bridge, et al

With a city named "Bridgeport", how could a bridge hunter go wrong? It was the Congress Street Bridge that made the list of historical bridges -- you can see it blurrily in the background there -- but the city is known for its large number of bridges.

Well, the Congress Street Bridge is closed. The movable bit -- the bascule -- is removed, and the bridge is all blocked off.

Here's a picture of the other side of the Congress Street Bridge. It's a nice enough bridge. It was frozen in the upright position, and I was hoping to get a shot of that. But they were gone, and what's left is nothing worth a trip.

Turning to the other direction is a nice lift bridge. It carries the Amtrak tracks over the Pequonnock River.

There's another lift bridge around the bend in the river that carries pedestrian and auto traffic across the river, and finally, the biggest bridge of all...

The I-95 bridge over the river. It continues south along the coast to New York City, and east toward the mouths of the Housatonic, Quinnipiac, Connecticut and Mystic rivers -- each of which bear prettier bridges.

Bridge of the Day: Burnside Bridge, East Hartford, CT

Burnside Bridge

"Bridge of the Day" is for bridges I find on my way to work, maybe with a little detour along the way. To be honest, though, I didn't even know this bridge existed. There's no way I would have found this on my own. I was shocked to read about it on the CT Historic Bridge site. It's on a side road, the stonework isn't visible from the road, the only way you'd see it is if you decided to take this moment to look at the Hockanum River, but wait -- you wanted to climb down the bank, over the suspiciously bamboo-like reeds, and see it from water level. And then -- there's this bridge!



I guess you could see it from the houses over behind it, in the winter when the foliage wouldn't block it. And the people in the factory across the street probably know all about it.


CT Historic Bridges says the Burnside Bridge was "... Connecticut's first example of a "City Beautiful" bridge. Its graceful lines and granite-ashlar exterior show that it was intended to be aesthetically pleasing as well as functional."


Sorry for the blown out sky. Overcast morning. The only way to get any detail in the sky was HDR, and I wasn't set up for that.


The bike path from Manchester to East Hartford follows the Hockanum River for most of the way, so I have a couple other pictures to share.


This tunnel runs beneath the complicated 84/384 interchange. Left goes to Manchester Community College, and right goes to Hartford. Back the way I came is Wickham Park -- the subject of many photos -- and home. I actually took this picture yesterday. I wanted to get the Burnside Bridge photographed yesterday, but lack of research had me going left instead of right. Getting lost takes longer on a bicycle, but once I realized my mistake, it was far too late to head back the other way. I had to go straight to work.


This is why there's some sky showing in these two pictures while the one of the bridge I came to shoot is overcast. Plus these were phone pictures, and my phone has built in HDR. It's not perfect, but it works well enough.


This bridge is part of the same interchange system; the one above was just a little ahead of this shot. The Hockanum River runs placidly through it on its way to a dam that forms a small lake just before the Burnside Bridge. Once released from the dam, the river flows rapidly to its end in the Connecticut River.

West Cornwall Covered Bridge, West Cornwall-Sharon, CT

The third and last covered bridge in Connecticut, the West Cornwall Covered Bridge, crossing the Housatonic about 20 miles north of Bulls Bridge, a covered bridge in Kent. If you're already headed to the Berkshires to see one of them, you might as well see the other. And as long as you're coming to see _those_, you might as well stop by the Cornwall Bridge, a huge arch bridge in the town named Cornwall Bridge. That's a different post, though.

Of the three covered bridges in Connecticut, this is the largest, though still not wide enough to let two cars pass inside. Wikipedia says the bridge was originally built in 1864. Covered bridges weren't terribly rare back then; if you're going to be building a wooden lattice bridge anyway, not much reason not to wall it in and put a peaked roof on it to protect the deck from the weather. According to the Connecticut Historic Bridge site, the state department of transportation concealed steel beams in the flooring (same as they did with the Comstock covered bridge) to keep it safe for traffic. During last year's tropical storm, the Housatonic became violent and deadly -- but the bridge weathered it without damage.

For all the businesses in West Cornwall with "Covered Bridge" in their names, you'd think there'd be better parking for tourists -- the other two covered bridges have loads. If you want to get out of the car and walk around, you'll have to park in some business' parking spot, or along the cul de sac that runs for a short way along the river.

Once you are parked, there's plenty of places from which to take great pictures. Just watch the traffic; this bridge does see heavy use.

The Appalachian Trail does not run through this bridge, but it's not far away. I'll talk more about that in my next post, when I write about Cornwall Bridge.

Not to be confused with West Cornwall Covered Bridge.

This was the last major bridge shoot I did with my point-and-shoot Canon G12. There's a small scrape on the lens that ruins every picture taken with it; I had to be really careful to keep the scrape outside of any picture detail. If you look for it, you can see it in both these shots. I really need to get that fixed. I understand there are kits that can maybe do it. It's a really handy camera with very powerful built-in software.

Since then, I've been using an older, but yet-unscratched, Canon EOS Rebel T1 camera. It's a digital single lens reflex (DSLR) camera that does hardly anything for you. That's also its strength. Since it doesn't know all the rules about taking pictures like the G12 does, I can break them if I need to. Plus it can shrink the aperture down to a pinhole, allowing some pretty cool effects in the right hands (not mine).

From the archives: Ashland Mill Bridge, Jewett City, CT

I had a flat tire on the bike and an early meeting, so I wasn't able to get the bridge I wanted to photograph today. Tomorrow's going to be kinda cruddy, weather-wise, as well. So tonight, one from the archives: a footbridge across a canal in Jewett City.

By itself, it isn't that amazing or historic; it's not that different from ornamental footbridges in any town in the country. Just downstream from this bridge, though, recently stretched the famous Ashland Mill Bridge. Though dripping with history, it had become dangerous and closed to all traffic. A park had grown up around it. There was a new bridge. The old one was demolished.

Jewett City has that kind of small town beauty that you often hear about but rarely find -- and never close to cities. Driving through the town sent me right back to my childhood in Linwood, Massachusetts, a village even _smaller_ than Jewett City. Not that there's any sort of contest going on.

Near where I grew up

Anyway. Ashland Mill Bridge. According to the Public Archaeology site, the Ashland Mill Bridge was one of two bridges in the area constructed by the Berlin Iron Bridge company and of which was said:

The two bridges made by you, of iron, are in place. . . . I am very much pleased with them, and am satisfied that they are constructed on the right principle and are destined to be the bridge of the future.


So there you have it. The bridge of the future almost, but not quite, made it to the present.

"The Map" as of January, 2012

I thought I'd had a pretty good handle on the historic bridges of Connecticut. Photographing them seemed like something that could happen in the coming year... And then this morning I came across CT's Historic Highway Bridges, which had all of my bridges on the list, as well as dozens of others I'd never heard about. Some of them are not that far away, either.

The Map doesn't contain these new bridges yet, and doesn't contain the bridges out of state that I've photographed. The bridges with green dots are those I've photographed and will blog about in the coming months. The bridges with red dots are those I'm going to get to sometime. Some of the bridges, especially the closer ones, are going to wait until bicycle season.