Pine Street Bridge

On the top, this bridge looks like an ugly slab of concrete, but underneath is a bridge that is attractive and unusual. The bridge is a steel arch bridge. The arch is made up of plate steel that resembles the steel seen on plate girder bridges. The spandrels are v-laced steel, like what you would find on a historic truss bridge. There are four steel arches providing width to the bridge. Between these four arches is various bracing with is riveted. The deck of the bridge is concrete, which sits on top of steel. When viewed from beneath, this truly is a steel bridge, because you can not even see the concrete of the deck. On the topside of the deck, the concrete has probably been replaced once, and I doubt that the guardrails are original, unless the bridge is newer than it appears to be.

The bridge's v-laced spandrels, an attractive arch shape, and its location in a pretty valley with old canal locks beneath combine to make this bridge a pretty bridge in a pretty area. I am sure there are other bridges like this around, but this bridge struck me as interesting because it was different. What makes this bridge unusual is the v-lacing on the spandrels. The metal that is usually riveted together to form the repeating "v" shape is actually bolted together! It looks quite odd to see bolted v-lacing. This could mean a couple things. It could mean that the whole bridge was built in say the 1940s as v-lacing was starting to become outdated and bolts were starting to become more dominant in bridge building. It could also mean that the spandrels were replaced at some point, and whoever redid them was nice enough to try to replace them with spandrels that looked like the originals.