Growing up in the 1950s, my family would often go for Sunday drives from our Irvington home. Our Chevy sedan, with my dad at the wheel and my mom riding “shotgun,” me and my two brothers packed in the back seat, would head out for a “drive in the country.” Generally, the drive was either east, south, or southeast. The drive east was along the National Road, and it usually included a detour through Riley Park in Greenfield where the parkway led the vehicle across the Brandywine Creek “ford.” It was always exciting to watch from the car as it approached the brook, gradually proceed through the flowing water as it splashed around the car, and then up the little grade on the other side. We always joked that was how we washed the tires.
Fortunately, by my childhood, the fording of streams was an amusement. The struggles of travel across waterways big and small had been mostly eased by bridges. Today, we hardly give a thought to the culverts and streams we drive across daily on paved spans, and unless it’s a really big river we don’t pay much attention to the bridge. The only time we appreciate the convenience of a bridge in our travels is when the bridge is closed for repairs and we must seek another crossing.
When Indianapolis was platted, the greatest water barriers to travelers were White River, “a stream of considerable volume, averaging…four hundred feet in width, and, except…a few shoal spots, too deep to be fordable” and Fall Creek. Most of the other waterways in the area slowed travel but could be forded. The first settler in the area, John McCormick, operated a ferry on White River, “a little below” where the wooden National Road bridge was eventually built in 1834. The fare for a horse and rider was 12½ cents for one crossing.
Following the opening of the National Road bridge in the mid-30s, White River was spanned with a bridge at Morris St, and in 1851 trains began to cross the river with the completion of the Terre Haute & Indianapolis Railroad bridge a few blocks south of Washington St. “Three fine covered wooden bridges” crossed Fall Creek “at convenient points,” and the county commissioners had a covered wooden bridge and an iron bridge built across Mud Creek in the northeast of Marion County. In 1877, an iron bridge spanned Big Eagle Creek on Lafayette Rd. at Trader’s Point.
By the 1890s the “horse an’ buggy” era bridges, while several having been replaced with iron, were straining under the weight of modern street cars. Several years of squabbling between the county commissioners and the city on replacing the Fall Creek bridges came to an end in May 1899 when a portion of the Central Ave. bridge collapsed leaving a motor car and the two gravel cars it was towing dangling perilously above the water below. The county commissioners approved replacing the wrecked Central Ave. bridge with a traditional one of stone. The following month, Mayor Tom Taggart announced an ambitious plan to build bridges using the Melan Arch construction method, a design patented by a German professor, of “steel arches imbedded in concrete and decorated with stone facings,” at the Meridian St. and Illinois St. crossings of Fall Creek.
A “handsome structure, of oolitic stone…with cement walks and macadam roadway” opened to Central Ave. traffic across Fall Creek in July 1900 in time for street cars to carry crowds out to the Fair Grounds to witness the exhibition of the head-on collision of two locomotives. In the following months, “substantial and handsome specimens of bridge architecture” were completed over Fall Creek at Meridian St. and Illinois St. However, the older bridges across White River continued to serve the traveling public despite in some cases having been “declared unsafe.”
Mother Nature hastened the replacement of the White River bridges with the disastrous flood of March 1904 that damaged or swept away most of the bridges spanning the river. A new steel girder structure on stone abutments was built at the Washington St. crossing and three-span bridges using the Melan Arch design were constructed at the Michigan St. crossing, the Emrichsville (16th St.) crossing, and the Thirtieth St. crossing. A five-span bridge constructed in the Melan Arch style was built at the Morris St. crossing. At the time it was built, the River Ave. bridge over White River had the longest concrete girders of any span yet constructed in the United States.
Another bridge design that was used for spanning smaller streams was the Luten Arch, a curved steel rod and concrete design promoted by Daniel B. Luten of the National Bridge Co. In the summer of 1903 this style of bridge was constructed across Pogues Run at Nowland Av near Brookside Park. Currently Pathways Over Pogues, a grassroots group of Near East Side neighbors, is working to repair the bridge.
While bridges are built to span physical spaces that otherwise divide, the “Yellow Bridge” across the Canal at Indiana Ave. was also a demarcation point between black and white Indianapolis communities. Named for the yellow painted lattice work along its sides, the bridge had been known by its color since the late 1860s. It developed an odious reputation as the scene of vice and violence, murder and mayhem. It was also the scene of political meetings and black church baptisms. When the old “Yaller bridge” collapsed under the weight of a steam roller and was replaced with a concrete structure, Mayor Bookwalter acceded to the request of a delegation of business leaders from the northwest part of the city, who were seeking on “improving the moral tone of Indiana Ave.,” not to paint the new bridge in the former color.
Motorists, bike riders, and pedestrians think of bridges as a convenience, but most carry a story, too.
