Spring Garden Street Bridge

Spring Garden Street Bridge. . , A ferry and six successive bridges served this historic crossing of the Schuylkill River before the construction of the current spring Garden Street Bridge in 1966. Beginning about 1692, a ferry connecting the city and the roads to the agricultural hinder and of the colony. A floating bridge over the River here lasted from 1776 to 1798 when a flood destroyed it. High water washed away its successor, also a floating bridge, in 1809. The first permanent span at this location opened in 1813. For it, Lewis Wernwag, one of the earliest professional bridge builders in the nation, designed a timber arch-covered structure. Known as the Colossus of Fairmount or the Upper Ferry Bridge, it ranked as the longest single-arch bridge in the world. It burned in 1838., In 1842, Colonel Charles Ellet, Jr. created the Wire Bridge to replace the Colossus. The first cable suspension bridge for vehicles in the country, this bridge, 357 feet in length, remained in use until 1875. Its narrow roadway, a mere 18 feet, could no longer carry the volume of traffic generated by a rapidly expanding city. Jacob H. Linville, an engineer, designed the next bridge. He specified a double-deck, Linville truss bridge with an upper deck to take Spring Garden Street over the River and a lower deck for Callowhill Street. It lasted 90 years when obsolescence and deterioration required its replacement., The present Spring Garden Street Bridge, the work of Leopold Neiman, the City's Chief Bridge Engineer, with Harbeson, Hough, Livingston and Larson, architects, consists of a two-level structure resting on common piers. The lower level measures 740 feet in length and links the West River Drive to the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. The 440 feet upper level carries Spring Garden Street between the Parkway and West Philadelphia. The Bethlehem Steel Corporation fabricated the welded box girders used to construct this bridge. this technique permitted unusually long welded spans and yielded a smooth, uninterrupted exterior appearance. The lower level opened in December 1965, the upper bridge in June 1966.