East Swinney Park Bridge

Most Recent Visit: April 2, 2006

Tucked away in a residential neighborhood, is a bridge that in my mind is unusual, and has a huge amount of historic significance. What makes it significant is that this is a turn-of-the-century pin connected Pratt through truss bridge that was built to support pedestrian traffic only. Often here in the 21st century, vehicular truss bridges are restored to support only pedestrian traffic, but here is a bridge that was originally built for pedestrians! It would seem like there should be more bridges like this in the world somewhere, but I have yet to find them. But you have to consider, that usually, a vehicular bridge would be built to connect a park to a residential neighborhood across a river, and sidewalks would simply be placed on such a bridge. So perhaps this situation did not occur often. For whatever reason, there was no need for cars to access the park from this location, so a pedestrian bridge was built.

Having viewed only vehicular truss bridges all my life, experiencing this bridge was an interesting one. This is a bridge you have to visit, and feel what it is like to be on. You might expect the bridge to be narrower and have a small vertical clearance, and indeed it has those characteristics. But it still is a weird feeling, to be able to reach up and touch the bottom of the portal bracing. The lightweight lattice railings, which are a comparable size, or even a bit larger, to that seen on vehicular bridges reach halfway up the height of the bridge! The smaller dimensions of the bridge give the illusion that the bridge is extremely long. This is on top of the fact that this is a long bridge. The St. Marys River is no creek. One thing you might not expect is that the members and chords are of decent size, not much smaller than on some vehicular bridges. This is because this one-span bridge spans such a long distance, it still needed the large members and chords to stand strong. The floor beams however, only having to hold pedestrians, are very small! There is v-lacing present on the sway bracing and on the vertical members, and lattice is present on the railings and portal bracing.