Tag: siuslaw river bridge

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This American Gripe

The world is, per custom, full of more serious issues and worthier subjects in my life and others’, but sometimes you just have to put all that aside and complain. Listening to one of my several daily fulminations on diverse subjects, Kate said, “You should have your own show — ‘This American Gripe.’ ” I like the idea well enough, but so far it hasn’t gone further than that (although I will note that as of this writing the exact phrase “this American gripe” appears exactly once in Google’s database and that thisamericangripe.com is still available).

So, This American Gripe. Here’s one:

I mentioned recently that I got a call from someone in Oregon who wanted to use a picture that I took last year. Kate and I, with dog in tow, drove up to Eugene over Memorial Day weekend, picked up Thom and drove over to Florence, on the coast. A beautiful arched lift bridge carries U.S. 101 over the Siuslaw River there, and I took some pictures of it.

OK, then. I got a phone call about 10 days ago from a woman named Nancy who works for the Harley-Davidson dealership in Coos Bay, well down the coast from Florence. The town has a rhododendron festival, and the Harley place is making up a special T-shirt for the occasion. Nancy said they liked one of the pictures I took and wanted to use it as part of the T-shirt design. I was flattered. Naturally, I said they were welcome to do so; I just asked for a couple of the T-shirts in return for sending them the highest resolution version of the picture I had.

Since I had taken several bridge pictures that I put online, I asked Nancy to describe the one she wanted: It was an image that was obviously taken in the middle of the roadway with one of the bridge arches in the foreground and a car visible far down the road. From the group of shots I had taken, only one fit that description and I emailed the original to Nancy. I remarked that it looked a little darker than the online version of the shot; she agreed and asked whether I had a brighter version; I adjusted the brightness and contrast and color qualities of the picture and sent two more versions for Nancy to compare.

Then she said that the shot I sent her seemed to have been cropped–that the one she was looking at appeared to have been taken a little farther out from the bridge structure than the version I’d sent. I checked to see whether I had cropped the original. Nope. But at this point I suspected that we were not talking about the same picture at all and asked her to send me a copy. She did, and here it is (left–hers) side by side with the original (right–mine).

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Well, they are pictures of the same bridge. But if you asked for a copy of the one on the right, and someone sent you the other one, would you think for even a moment that they were the same picture? No, you wouldn’t. For her part, Nancy seemed reluctant to believe that the picture she had wasn’t my work, even after I told her it wasn’t.

Next time, I suppose the smart thing to do would be to ask for a copy of the picture in question before I start trying to hunt for something I don’t have.

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Bridge

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In our brief trip out to the Oregon coast the other day, we stopped in the town of Florence. It’s the closest shore point to Eugene, 60 miles, and there are big sand dunes and wide beaches nearby. Also: clam chowder. There’s a touristy restaurant called Mo’s, part of a five-establishment chain that legend (and the company website) says started as a family operation in Newport, north of Florence, during World War II.

After having our chowder and fish sandwiches, we walked around a little in the boutiquey downtown area, a few blocks of shops between U.S. 101 and the Siuslaw River. There’s a gem of a bridge that carries 101 across the Siuslaw (SIGH-you-slaw): a complex of arches and a lift bridge dressed up with Art Deco details.

Leaving town, we stopped at the south end of the bridge so I could walk across, get a closer look, and take some pictures. There’s a plaque on the south anchorage that says it was completed in 1936, a project (No. 982) of the Federal Emergency Administration of Public Works, an agency that was part of Roosevelt’s New Deal plan to get people back to work by investing in public infrastructure. The plaque lists a contractor, the Mercer-Fraser Company (of Eureka, California), but not a designer.

The Siuslaw River Bridge is exquisitely detailed and just a little odd. The concrete railings running its 1,586-foot length use a sort of Gothic — almost Moorish — arch-window motif. A collection of spires and towers begin at the bridge anchorages and build to a sort of climax with four massive reinforced concrete constructions guarding either side of the lifting section in the middle. Those central structures, which I’ve read were entrances to bridgetenders’ quarters, resemble giant bishops’ hats with Prussian spikes at the top; they’d look at home as an architectural detail in a Fritz Lang movie or in that dark opening Xanadu sequence in “Citizen Kane.” My artistically/architecturally/historically illiterate descriptions aside, it’s clear that whoever designed the structure was thinking about the aesthetic impact of his work as well as its function.

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When I got back to a computer, I looked up the bridge. No surprise: It’s a well-known landmark, the work of Conde B. McCullough, Oregon’s chief bridge engineer from 1919 to 1946. He had a hand in designing hundreds of bridges across the state, but his signature work was the series of spans, about 160 in all, he designed for Oregon’s Coast Highway. McCullough (born in South Dakota, educated at Iowa State) is a cult figure among bridge buffs. The Oregon Department of Transportation has a nice brochure on him and his coast bridges (it’s a PDF file), “Conde McCullough, Oregon’s Master Bridge Builder.” The Iowa State alumni magazine published a tribute to his work a few years ago (including a stunning photo gallery). And Oregon State University in 2001 published a McCullough biography, “Elegant Arches, Soaring Spans” (available new from OSU for $24.95 or from Amazon for $18.96).

Most of what you read about McCullough focuses on his abilities as an engineer and how innovative he was using techniques and materials to overcome challenges at each bridge site. Looking at this one bridge, though, and seeing pictures of the others, I’m just as interested in what formed his aesthetic imagination, the element that transformed these structures into objects that compel you to stop and examine them.

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