Mill Street Bridge

Most Recent Visit To Bridge: July 3, 2006

Bizzare is perhaps the best way to describe the appearance of this bridge. The historic bridge inventory describes the bridge as being "skewed on one side only." I am not an engineer, and so I don't know how that is possible, but all I know is that makes the bridge look pleasingly weird. This is why historic truss bridges contribute so much to their surrounding environment. While a modern beam bridge might not result in any notice by people, this bridge might even attract the attention and interest of people not interested in bridges. It is the sort of bridge that demands notice and attention. On each end of the bridge, one of the end posts is normally sloped, and the other is perfectly vertical. This mainly eliminates the heavily crooked appearance of a standard skewed bridge, but the bridge still looks weird, because it is not symmetrical, especially when seen from the portal view. Besides the fancy skew, this is an attractive bridge with v-lacing, lattice, and pinned connections. The truss configuration is Parker.

The one of the center spans of the Mahoning Avenue Viaduct has this same unusual design, although it doesn't stand out as much because it is buried between other standard truss spans. The Mahoning Avenue Viaduct was designed by Thomas Gilkey, who designed a number of truss structures for Lawrence County. Given that both the viaduct and this bridge share the unusual skew design, it seems likely that Gilkey designed the Mill Street Bridge as well.

I am unsure why this bridge's unique skew design was not consider an innovated or distinctive detail by the historic bridge inventory. I doubt many bridges were built with such an unusual design. Just because New Castle has two examples, doesn't mean that are common everywhere.