Category: default || By jt3y

As promised, I spent last night rustling up old photos of the 15th Avenue Bridge. That means today's Almanac is going to be fairly short again. There are seven pictures up now, including pictures of the demolition.

A note on the photos: These were taken in roughly 1993 or 1994 with my fixed-focus plastic Kodak 35 mm camera, because I didn't get a decent camera (a secondhand Canon QL17, bought at Photographics Supply for about $85) until 1995 or so.

As a dorky pre-teen and teenager, I was always running around Our Fair City, taking pictures of things, never knowing that someday, Al Gore would invent the Internet, and I'd be able to bore the hell out of people all over the world by forcing them to look at blurry snapshots of old buildings and bridges.

I only wish I had a better camera back then. If I had a time machine, I'd go back and confront the 14-year-old version of myself. I'd say, "Kid, ditch the camera, comb your hair, and go get a girlfriend, for crying out loud."

Also, a note on terminology: While many people call it the "15th Street Bridge," all of our Our Fair City's numbered streets are technically "avenues." Thus, it should correctly be called the "15th Avenue Bridge." I didn't know this little tidbit of information when I wrote the bridge demolition story 10 years ago, but I was educated later on by Don Dulac and Elmer Brewer when I went to work for the News.

It also occurred to me last night that I've now seen two bridges get blown up (or as Joe Flaherty and John Candy used to say, "blowed up real good!"). The other was the old Station Street bridge in North Irwin.

The photo above, incidentally, shows the Port Vue side of the 15th Avenue Bridge, in the view that a motorist coming from Our Fair City would have had. Just past the end of the bridge was a hairpin left-hand turn, and past that was a intersection providing access to River Road, River Ridge Road and Liberty Way. The entire intersection has now been re-aligned, and no longer exists.

That picture may make the 15th Avenue Bridge look a little bit ratty, and I apologize for that. In person, it actually looked a whole lot worse. And we drove over it in this condition for years.