“”The man with a briefcase was stunned for a moment. Getting out of a cab early Monday morning at State Street and Wacker Drive, he had obviously not heard the news. He stared for a while at the large declarative signs nearby, ‘Bridge Out’ and ‘Sidewalk Closed.’ Then he shrugged his shoulders and said, as he started walking east, ‘OK, then. It’s Wabash for me.’
“And it will be for a while. Those signs and some barricades signaled that the city’s Department of Transportation had commenced what it deems emergency repair work on the State Street Bridge above and over the Chicago River. The bridge is closed to all vehicular and pedestrian traffic for the removal and replacement of floor beams, rehabilitation of multiple center lock components, and viaduct repairs north of the bridge. It is scheduled to be finished by mid-November, but you know how these things go.
“Tens of thousands of us cross our bridges every day without an ounce of notice or appreciation.
“Maybe this will help: There is not a city in the world — not Paris, not Venice — with more movable bridges than Chicago. There are 52 of them over the river.
“As an alternative to using canoes to get across, people built the first bridge in 1831 across the North Branch. It was meant to allow easy access to and less dangerous egress from a saloon. The bridge didn’t last long, but in 1834 came the city’s first movable bridge, a drawbridge at Dearborn Street which, legend has it, got stuck so often that it was chopped up to be used as firewood.
“Then in 1902, the Cortland Street Bridge became the first trunnion bascule bridge ever built. Essentially a drawbridge with two halves that moved, this design (bascule is French for ‘seesaw’) became known as a ‘Chicago-style bridge’ and was the dominant design for all bridges that followed.
“My favorite has long been the Michigan Avenue Bridge, built between 1917 and 1920, the work of architect Edward Bennett. Have a look, if you never have, at the relief sculptures that adorn the pylons that sit at each of the bridge’s corners: ‘The Pioneers,’ with John Kinzie, one of the city’s first settlers (northwest); ‘The Discoverers,’ marking the exploits of explorers Marquette and Joliet (northeast); ‘Defense,’ depicting the Battle of Fort Dearborn (southwest); and ‘Regeneration,’ honoring the city’s rebuilding after the fire of 1871 (southeast).
“Sometimes I will walk down the stairs and cross the bridge on its lower level, where I am quickly hit with the cinematic memory of Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) meeting cop Jim Malone (Sean Connery) in the 1987 film ‘The Untouchables,’ screenplay by Chicago’s own David Mamet.
“From the bridge, you can hear the past whisper of the Native Americans who found skunk cabbage and wild onion on its banks and affixed to this site the Indian name for those earth products, Checagou, and of the engineering geniuses who reversed the river’s flow in 1900 to keep the lake clean.
“Few people have appreciated the bridges more than writer Janice Rosenberg, who wrote of them in the 1991 magazine of the Chicago Historical Society (now the Chicago History Museum), saying, in part, ‘Viewed from all directions, Chicago’s bridges are works of art as well as wonders of modern engineering.’ (Kogan, Chicago Tribune, 5/2/25)