The next stop on my Lileks-like bout of architectural canoodling; the Ford Bridge. 

The Ford Bridge just screams “Saint Paul” to me. 

Completed in 1927, in the same general era as my other favorite Twin Cities bridges (the Central Avenue, Cedar, and Robert Street bridges), the Ford exudes art-deco. 

Let the bridge geek speak:

The Intercity Bridge [the Ford’s official name] is a reinforced concrete, open-spandrel, two-rib, continuous-arch bridge. Each of the three main arches has two five-centered ribs with a 300-foot span. The main spans are flanked by single arch spans of 139 feet each. The bridge is historically significant as one of the largest reinforced concrete bridges ever built in Minnesota and is a significant engineering accomplishment. The bridge is also historically significant as the major work of Norwegian-American engineer Martin Sigvart Grytbak. Although the deck was rebuilt and widened in 1972-1973, the bridge retains full engineering integrity as a monumental, continuous-arch bridge.

I grew up amid the last of the detritus of the Art Deco era; Popeye cartoons, my grandma’s toaster, the occasional thirties-era car that soldiered on in Jamestown, and (I swear I remember this) the odd old NRO poster stuck in the corner of someone’s garage.  So the Ford Bridge seems – familiar, almost?  Comfortable? 

The other impression you get – like with a lot of bridges from this era, when materials weren’t as strong and engineering was, while an exact science, very aware of its own limitations – is that it’s overbuilt. 

It’s graceful – not as clunky as, say, the Central Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis – but it still looks like a monument as much as a bridge.  It reminds you, in some ways, of the woodwork – hutches and buffets and bookcases – you find built into the houses of the era, with filigrees and ornamentation that nobody would design, much less pay for, in the dark ages of bridgebuilding that would follow a few decades later:

And of course, bridges were monuments back then; testimonials to the wisdom and foresight of the people who planned them, the skill of the designers and builders, and the power of a city that could carry people and traffic over a mighty river and a deep gorge, and do it in style. 

You can almost imagine Al Capone in his O’Connor-era heyday, tooling across the Ford in a Dusenberg SJ (or so I imagine), snug in the knowledge that the St. Paul Police were covering his back, coming back from Lake Minnetonka to a party at the Saint Paul Hotel. 

It’s as a stop on a biking trip that the Ford excels, of course.  Although you’re in the middle of a major metropolitan area, you can stop at the peak of the Ford’s span, and look up the gorge and, with a little creative filtering (like, ignoring the few visible houses and apartments and the Minneapolis skyline six miles upstream, and the Ford Lock and Dam just downstream…), imagine the place as it was when the first US soldiers started building Fort Snelling in 1819, just a mile or two downstream.