A lost bridge.
Farewell, with love.
So yesterday the venerable old Jamestown Bridge came down. I have long felt that the two-laned structure, though not wide enough for today's traffic needs, was enormously more attractive and aesthetic than its banal and purely functional wider replacement.
Why did it have to go? Could it not have been maintained and kept for possible eventual use for something like, say, a light-rail link between Providence, East Greenwich, Wickford, URI-Kingston, Jamestown, and Newport?
I remember walking the entire bridge back in the 1970s. The parents of my late friend Ted Dambruch owned a summer house at Plum Point, about a three minute walk from the bridge's entrance and the toll booth that used to be there. You could turn left from his street to the bridge road then. Once, after listening to a recording of Bruckner's grandiose Symphony No. 9 in the summer-house-without-inside-walls, we strolled the entire span. A magnificent vista surged from the top of that bridge, aptly accompanied by remembered Brucknerian musical monumentality. At the midpoint, it was always slightly scary, because a thick metal grating replaced the regular roadbed, and you could look down at your feet and see the water hundreds of feet directly below you. My testicles would tense up whenever I peered down.
So many things I loved from my earlier years have perished. As I have long rued the wanton destruction of the RKO Albee Theatre in Providence, I now I rue the demise of the old Jamestown Bridge. I wasn't there yesterday at the demolition, but if I had been, I would not have applauded.
(Cross-posted to weird_ri)