|
Key Facts |
Bridge Name | Type | Road | Location | City | Crossing |
| Grosse Ile Toll Bridge | Swing (Truss) | Bridge Street | Wayne County, MI | Grosse Ile | Trenton Channel (Detroit River) |
You do not have to worry about the road commission ripping this beautiful bridge down, because they don't own it! It was built and has been run as a private operation right from the beginning. It is much older than the other bridge to the island, with a 1913 construction date. There is v-lacing on diagonal members, and lattice under the top chord. Original guardrails to not remain on the bridge. The configuration of the bridge is camelback warren through truss, including the one middle swing span. There are two camelback truss spans at each end of the swing span, yielding a total of five truss spans on the bridge. Sadly, a nice pony truss span, located on the causeway on the eastern end of the bridge was removed in 2002 and replaced with an ugly new bridge. Why anyone did not notice that this pony bridge was one of only two remaining queenpost truss bridges in the state, I do not know. Obviously, there is only one left now, it is the much more rustic Dewitt Road Bridge which, ironically, is also privately owned. I am unsure why this attractive little queenpost bridge could not have been restored in the way the main bridge was. Other than this, the bridge is well maintained, and paint is on the bridge. The deck looked in great shape too. In fact, repairs of some sort were being made to the swing span when I visited this bridge.
A tragedy befell the bridge on September 1992, when the second span from the island was hit and knocked into the water by the freighter H. Lee White, a 700 foot vessel which was carrying 67 million pounds of iron ore. Greg Kish emailed me some photos of the span in the water, and those are available in the photo gallery. To the best of my knowledge it has either been completely replaced, or heavily repaired. The casual visitor to this bridge would not even know this, because the span looks like all the others. It looks like it was either repaired or rebuild with an enormous amount of attention paid to historic appearance. The reason you can tell it is newer is because it is all bolts and no rivets. What is interesting however, is that the bolts they selected have round heads, so they look a lot like rivets from one side. As the result, it looks a lot nicer than other modern truss bridges with bolted connections, like KH-21. Also, there is still v-lacing and lattice on it just like the old spans. This is both unusual and excellent... new truss bridges usually have no v-lacing or lattice.
One thing I do not like about this bridge is that pedestrians are not welcome on the bridge. There are no sidewalks for people who want to walk across the bridge. They also did not allow me to walk across the bridge for the purpose of photo-documenting it for this website. Before making a trip down to this area, I had contacted the Grosse Ile Bridge Company, and asked them if they would let me walk across the bridge and photograph it. I informed them that I was quite familiar with photographing bridges with active car traffic, and was prepared to deal with that. I received a short email that said I did not have permission to do that. My requests for information on the history of the bridge were not answered either. As far as photographing the bridge, I still managed to get some decent photos. They do allow you to ride a bike across the bridge, and so I did do that, and shot some photos of the bridge as I rode across. My coverage of the bridge, especially the swing span, is not as complete as I would like, however. It is too bad that the Grosse Ile Bridge Company did not want to assist me, as I had nothing but praise for the excellent job they have done maintaining the bridge, using funds gathered from the tolls. Because of the difficulty I had getting photos, I have included a large number of what I did get in my photo gallery.
