Bridge to Nowhere
(The Interstate Bridge)
My nerves are still all jangled after the Holiday Road Trip. I barked at some fat businessman who tried to cut in front of me at the car rental return place at the airport when I shed the big Lincoln, and the Navy Captain does not come out that much anymore except when I am stressed out. Mostly I am over that.
I gather that I am not as young as I once was, and a little jaunt that would have been taken in stride not so long ago seems to have run right over me.
I like big cars and long straight-aways, but the latter are in short supply climbing up from the coastal plain of the Chesapeake to the Eastern Continental Divide, and the long drop down to the Ohio Valley.
Shoveling out the mass of communications on my return I found a note from a pal that struck me. He spent the holiday with his Mom and Dad, now in their eighties like mine. He drove them back to the city after the family dispersed. On the way, they got to talking about ancient stuff, safe recollections, mostly sports.
He wrote: “Dad grew up in Philadelphia and rooted for the Phillies and the old Athletics. They were American Leagues champs for three years, starting in 1929, the year of the Crash, and World Series champs in 1929 and 30. My Grandfather was an English Protestant, though, and there was some baggage with that. He hated the A's because they were owned and managed by Irish Catholic Connie Mack. So, despite living in Philly, my Grandad rooted for the Washington Senators.”
That struck a chord from the funeral last Monday, which is perhaps the last time I will ever set foot in the little Valley town. My cousins buried their Dad that day, in the Protestant cemetery on the hill, across the road from where the Catholics were permitted to rest in peace.
That is where the wild Irishman lies, with his wife, my maternal Grandmother, and my Aunt Hazel and some of the other Irish.
I answered back right away, even though my fingers were a little jumpy, and I kept looking around the den for the mirrors that had surrounded my all the way from Michigan, looking for cops and overtaking traffic.
That was the kind of real family history you love to get, even if it makes you squirm a bit. The cousins are my Mom’s family, and my Dad’s folks were very much people of their times. My eyes got wide a few years ago, when Dad could still tell a tale, that the Socotras in New Jersey were veryconcerned that Mom might have been Catholic, based on her good Irish last name. They were prepared to black-ball her as a potential wife on those grounds, and I know for a fact that they were suspicious of people who didn't decorate their houses for Christmas, since Grandma Socotra told me about them herself.
Mom’s mother- Voigt was the maiden name- was of the German line that included the Prachts. She refused to bring her kids up in the Church, insisting they be raised Protestant.
That didn't seem to bother Grand-dad Mike. Besides leading the "Irish Mafia" Big Reds of Bellaire, Ohio, to the State High School Football championship, serving in World War One, and joining the Bonus Army in 1932, he was a pugnacious man when in his cups, which was frequent.
That is why I like to think that he stayed to fight Doug MacArthur’s troops in the last days of the Army on the Anacostia Flats here in Washington.
His picture is still up on the wall of the High School, though the team went 0-10 this year, and there is talk about selling the place and converting it to a Catholic girl's academy.
I am getting a little ahead of myself by a hundred years or so. I hit the big chunk cut through Sideling Hill just as the dawn was coming up. We can thank Senator Byrd for giving us I-68 that runs to Morgantown, but we really should remember Mr. Jefferson, who authorized the National Road that followed this path west in 1806.
George Washington helped survey part of it for General Braddock on the ill-fated expedition to attack the French at Fort Duchesne, or modern Pittsburgh.
There was a race between the canal men and the railroad visionaries to make the Ohio River, and it was settled on the course of the National Pike at the town of Cumberland, MD. it is a fine brick city of a certain age where the iron horse vanquished the canal boats at 610 feet above sea level.
I whizzed through there, checking the clock, and figured I could make the funeral with minutes to spare if I just kept my foot on the gas and stayed focused. The fact that the UAW craftsmen had built this car with a disinclination for the passenger’s door to close made the wind noise a clear and distinct irritant, but I had no time to stop if I was going to make it.
Morgantown slid by, and I cut up I-79 toward Pittsburgh, just as General Braddock had done on the way to his doom. I followed the path of the National Pike to Wheeling, West Virginia, and by the time I cross the river into Ohio I realized I had been in six states and the District of Columbia before a proper breakfast.
Little Bellaire lies on the western shore of the fertile valley of the Ohio River, bounded on the east by the brown water and on the west by green rolling hills. Some people have dubbed his part the state the "Switzerland of Ohio," which tells you something about the natural optimism and delusion of the people who came here to settle by the great inland waterways.
The first of them arrived on the shallow flood-plain by the river in 1803, the same year Ohio became a state. By1832, "Bel Air" consisted of six log cabins, and hade been named after founder Jacob Davis' home town in Hartford County, northeast of Baltimore. He came via the National Pike, headed for riches in the Ohio Territory. The Irish followed soon after, with the line of which I am part landing in Baltimore during the Famine and heading west to build the railroads as far west as the Tennessee.
Transportation was always the key to Bellaire’s existence. During the civil war a pontoon bridge was maintained to shuttle Federal troops from Bellaire to West Virginia, the part of the Old Dominion that seceded from the Secession.
The river, the railroad, glass and coal were what made the little town, and in the end they all left it behind.
I drove down Ohio Route 7 along the river for a mile or two and entered Bellaire on the north end of town. Bedraggled row-houses line Nobel street, which is anything but. Mom’s family lived on this street- somewhere near the Dairy Queen- in between the hard times when the family had to move in with her Grandmother when times were hard.
She told me about great grandmother’s house, which was near the south viaduct of the Stone Bridge, on Hamilton Street. That sharp curve is what caused my Dad to think the locomotive was coming right in the window, the first time he visited. The bridge across the Ohio from Benvwood connected the Central Ohio Railroad with the B & O Railroad in 1871. Prior to that, passengers had to debark one train and be ferried across the river where they would board another. At the time of its completion, it is said that the bridge was the longest stone arch in the United States.
The little house by the viaduct would have been built around the same time. It was small quarters for the three little girls, the wild Irishman, Grandma, and her mother. Mom described the place for me. There were only three real rooms, with the girls sharing one bed and the adults sorting out the rest.
The viaduct to the Stone Bridge is where I had to stop the big Lincoln. The clock said I was still a half hour before the ceremony, but I could not recall the way to get up the hill to the cemetery. Downtown was spooky, abandoned-looking under gray skies.
Most of the construction happened after the boom that came with the bridge, and that is what is falling down now. They say the town grew 500 percent in the twenty years after the bridge went up, and has been declining ever since.
The town had always been a junction for the iron horse. The Bellaire & Southwestern and the Zanesville & Southeastern Ohio had been independent roads back in the day, and were consolidated into the Bellaire, Zanesville & Cincinnati. The curves and turns on the rails were severe, and the nickname Bent, Zig-Zag & Crooked. Derailments and wrecks were frequent. Three trains were wrecked in just one afternoon, one falling into a stream and two totaled in a collision.
In 1902, the year before the first heavier than air flight, the railroad changed its name to the Ohio River & Western Railroad. It was natural that it was later known as the Old Rusty & Wobbly. The Wild Irishman worked for the B&O, which looked down it’s snooty east-coast nose at the narrow-gauge wildcats.
Everyone who was anyone from those days is in one of the two cemeteries on the hill above town. There were two because it simply was unthinkable that the Irish who built the railroads and bridges should be interred with the stolid German craftsmen from the Imperial Glassworks. Checking the GPS on my phone, I discovered where 34th street twisted up into the hills, and where the road bisected the two cemeteries.
I figured out how to navigate it from downtown, and turned left on Belmont to drive past some semi-demolished buildings. To my right, Route 7 cut the town off from the river that had given it life, and beyond that, stood the Bridge to Nowhere.
I had minutes to get up the hill, and I had to glide the Lincoln to a stop to gape at it. The later and unlamented Presidential campaign aside, there really are bridges that stand in lonely isolation, connected to nothing.
The Bellaire Toll Bridge, also known as the Interstate Bridge, was opened on Wednesday, December 22, 1926, to great applause. It was the first crossing designed with the automobile in mind, just upstream from The Stone Bridge. Designed by J. E. Greiner & Company, the cantilevered construction is a marvel of design. The The overall length of the bridge was 2770 feet, including the approach of 850 feet on the West Virginia side in Benwood, which still exists, and 670 feet on the Ohio side of the river which doesn’t.
At the highest point in the structure, it rises 350 feet above the brown water. More than 7 million pounds of steel were used in the construction, and it took a year and a half to build. Most of the nearly $1.5 million the structure cost was defrayed by Valley residents hopeful for a new future.
Toll across the bridge was a nickel, one-way, until 1971, when it was increased to a quarter. I don’t know if I ever crossed it. If It was on the itinerary of one of the family trips long ago I do not recall, though you can glimpse the structure, and what was Bellaire’s downtown in the movie “Silence of the Lambs.” Creepy? You bet. The pros chose this place to give you the willies.
The toll-booth is where it ends now, hanging there in space just a few dozen feet short of the shore. The bridge was closed to traffic on May Day in 1991 so that the private owner could sell the right of way to the State of Ohio. The Department of Transportation then demolished the on-ramp later that year for Route 7’s high-speed progress, and the structure passed into the hands of a local man who may or may not do something with it.
It was paid for long ago, after all. There is talk of making the span a pedestrian park, or doing something interesting with it. The alternative is to blow it up, or dismantle it to convert the steel to razor blades, like my old ships.
Demolition was scheduled for earlier this year, but there the thing still stood, beckoning.
Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
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