“Like a bridge over troubled waters!!! I will lay me down!!!” Always fascinating, never dull, these are necessary. Beam, Arch, Suspension, Truss. Over water, canyon, or manmade obstacles, bridges allow travel and themselves are works of art. The Golden Gate Bridge, The Brooklyn Bridge, Tower Bridge, Sydney Harbour. Architectural marvels and feats of construction. They are monuments to what’s possible. Stone, Wood, Steel. Which have you seen?
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By this time, his lungs were aching for air!
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Well I live near SF so I’ve been over both the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge many times. Also the San Mateo bridge, which is seven miles long; though I often avoid that one ever since the time I got stuck on it because someone drove into a utility pole and dropped live high-voltage wire across it. (I was lucky; being near the toll booths, there was a gap in the median where I was eventually able to turn around. People further ahead or back though were stuck for more than four hours. They charged me the toll when I made the U turn!)
Also the Dumbarton Bridge, made famous by the movie Sneakers:
And lots of others but those are my local ones.
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Did some backroading through rural VT and NH last weekend, and passed some covered bridges. Maybe not architectural marvels, but plenty of charm and some small measure of terror.
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Any Beau Bridges? The Bridges of Madison County? Takes on another meaning now. Covered Bridges? I’m in love with those. The red sides and white roofs? Pure beauty. The Northeast would be a treasure trove for those.
I live in (or near anyway) the land of the Covered Bridge Festival, so there’s a lot of those here.
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The John Seigenthaler Pedestrian Bridge in Nashville. These were taken the day after the Rad Rifftrax Live Show.
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I used to drive over this one ten or twelve times a week until recently, for a couple of years.
Classic suspension bridge. St. John’s Bridge in Portland, OR. Can be very pretty and atmospheric in certain kinds of light. This is sort of a no-nonsense picture of it.
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There used to be a website called bridgehunter.com, which is now inactive due to the death of the fellow running it. It listed both active and abandoned bridges. We would seek out the abandoned ones, which were always interesting. Concrete or metal structures in various states of decay, often covered with plant life, often running over scenic waterways.
Chattanooga has a pedestrian bridge, the Walnut Street Bridge.
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The Causeway Bridge spans 24 miles over Lake Pontchartrain.
Fun fact - for a couple miles in the center, you cannot see land in any direction. Unfortunately, there is not a place to pull off to admire the view.
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There are several water crossings called “The Bridge of Sighs”, most notably one in Venice. However, this one is part of St John’s College Cambridge. Only staff and alumni of the College and choir school are permitted to walk across it, which includes me. However, I think it is much nicer to look at from the outside.
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No bridge for you!
While not always bridges, wildlife crossings are the most natural looking bridges.
Example -
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Here’s the old bridge at Bahai Honda beach in Florida.
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What’s with the gap?
The bridge was abandon several decades ago when they built a newer road bridge. Since it’s not maintained at all, they removed that section to keep pedestrians from walking out onto it.
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Is that a successful deterrant? Or an attractive nuisance?
Here’s a nice one: the International Railway Bridge from Buffalo to Fort Erie, CA.
This is from the SW (Canadian) side, but underneath it in Buffalo, it’s a cool spot to chill out…lots of people fish out there, and there’s a cool plaque for the underground railroad crossing that was there, IIRC.
I don’t remember if it was here, but there’s another cool spot that actually has a much smaller bridge that lifts up, like the Blues Brothers bridge (the Daly bridge, I guess it’s called), and is cool to watch if you’re under it when it’s in motion.
I don’t remember where that was…close by, you know, Niagara River, in town, all that. Might have been further south, like closer to Cheektowaga…dunno.
The big bridge is a swing span bridge.
Here’s a broken link to a large picture from the American side: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/15/International_Bridge_-_north. jpg
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