Dearborn Street Bridge

Most Recent Visit To Bridge: August 12, 2006

Looking at this bridge you would likely not guess that this is one of Chicago's newer bridges, with a 1963 construction date. Having a truss construction, complete with rivets and even latticed and v-laced members and bracing underneath the deck, it certainly does not look like a 1960s bridge. V-lacing was not commonly used by this time, and rivets were beginning to fall to bolts in bridge construction as well. Truss bridges were even less common than rivets by this time. The bridge-tender's tower, which is much plainer than the ornate stone towers for many of the older Chicago Bridges, is the only hint that this bridge is newer. In 1963, I would have expected a plate girder the likes of which can be found in Port Huron Michigan. Perhaps the Dearborn Street Bridge was designed to be a truss so that it would fit in with the rest of the bridges in town. It is essentially identical in design to the narrower Wabash Avenue Bridge, constructed three decades earlier, in 1930. It is unfortunate that a historic truss design was not used in the 1980s Columbus Drive Bridge, which is not featured on this website due to a lack of beauty and history. In my mind, the Columbus Drive Bridge is a scar on the Chicago River landscape, as every single bridge the main branch of the Chicago River is a truss bascule, with the exception of the Columbus Drive Bridge.

This bridge is, like the Wabash Avenue bridge, unusual because of the placement of the deck. Like the rail bridge in London Ontario, the trusses are mainly below the deck, but do extend slightly above as well. This has the effect of making it look like there is not enough truss to support the bridge, when viewed from a distance as in the above photo. 11-96 is painted on one spot of the trusses, suggesting that the structure was last painted November, 1996. A visit in August 2006 revealed that the bridge was again being painted, so perhaps they try to repaint every decade.