Clean Waters Bridge

Here’s a riddle for you:

Question: What do you call a bridge that carries sewage over a 475-ft. high gorge?

Answer: The Clean Waters Bridge

OK, that’s not the answer I would have given or come up with for such a bridge, but it’s perhaps appropriate that it has such a surprising name, since the next bridge we discovered was not the bridge I was looking for. That’s the pleasure of an enterprise like this, finding the unexpected, even if that is a bridge sitting atop pipes carrying wastewater across the Genesee River.

Last Saturday Ursula and I set out intending to visit the bridge carrying the Route 104 highway—what I thought was the next span continuing south from the Patrick O’Rorke bridge. But when we parked in Maplewood Park I realized that just north of our destination was a bridge I’d never been on before, a single arch with a pedestrian walkway sitting on top of massive pipes. So we set off down a ramp that led towards the bridge.

The ramp on the west side inclines down to a concrete walkway atop massive pipes. It was clear that this was a case where a virtue was being made out of a necessity, but what were the pipes carrying? My first thought was natural gas, but that was just a guess and I know next to nothing about engineering. Our first clue as to the purpose of these pipes came as we began crossing the bridge and looked down and saw two tunnels at river level that I assumed must be part of a storm sewer system.

Storm tunnels on the west side of the river. There are matching tunnels on the east side.

One of the core challenges that urban planners have faced for centuries is how to deal with water, especially when water falls suddenly and abundantly during storms. Most American cities have fairly old sewer systems, and while they adequately handle the day-to-day production of sewage they are not well equipped to channel the additional capacity of a heavy rain storm. That is why municipalities develop plans for “combined sewer overflows” (CSO) to handle these sudden surges. And it turns out Rochester has one of the best in the country, and the bridge we were on is part of the solution.

In Rochester when it rains, most of the extra water (and all the ground pollution that gets swept up) flows into a series of massive storage tunnels that hold the water until it can be treated before it empties into Lake Ontario. This expanded system was constructed in the 1980s and consists of a network of 30 miles of massive tunnels that snake under the city. The author of the fabulous RochesterSubway.com blog took a tour of them and the pictures are astounding. It turns out the 6-foot diameter pipes running under the bridge carry wastewater from the west side of the river to the east side, flowing via gravity to the Frank E. VanLare Wastewater Treatment Facility. The pipes help provide stability to the bridge, so they serve a dual function of cleaning the environment and providing a spectacular view (by the way, the name “Clean Waters Bridge” is one that I only found used once, in a walking tour provided by the City of Rochester, and it does have the sound of what George Orwell termed “doublespeak”—one can imagine the bureaucratic committee when the bridge was built sitting around and trying to figure out what sort of name to give it and coming up with “Clean Waters Bridge”).

As you look north from the bridge the scenery is spectacular or…. interesting, depending on which side of the river you’re looking. The steep, wooded embankments of Seneca Park are on the east side…

…and the King’s Landing Wastewater Treatment Plant on the other side.

This industrial wastewater treatment plant is a legacy of the massive Kodak campus that stretches behind it, though now it serves the Eastman Business Park, the modern incarnation of what remains of Kodak and its facilities. The “King” in the “King’s Landing” title of the plant refers not to a monarch but to Gideon King and his family, pioneering European settlers of Rochester in the late 18th century, several of whom died from disease (the “Genesee Fever”) in 1803 and are buried in a small, decrepit cemetery that sits incongruously next to Lake Rd. on top of the bluff, hemmed in by the massive industrial complex that was once Kodak.

We crossed the bridge and walked up a hill on the east side to discover that it connected to Seneca Park right near the Seneca Park Zoo, a place we had visited many times before when the kids were younger and in recent years for the occasional cross-country running meet. Frederick Law Olmsted designed Seneca Park in 1888 to accentuate the natural scenery of the river and gorge, though as was the case with many of Olmsted’s parks, community leaders at some point determined that they wanted more options for urban amusement than just scenery, and the zoo and other recreation facilities were added, encroaching on his vision of an urban oasis.

View of walkway looking west

Immediately south of the bridge stands Veterans Memorial Bridge (the Route 104 bridge that was originally going to be our destination).

But that bridge would have to wait until next time, as we were running out of time for the day, but we were delighted that this unexpected discovery of this most unusual bridge took us on such an interesting detour. I’d highly recommend it for the views (though I’d probably park in Seneca Park) even if you have no interest in the intricacies of Rochester’s wastewater treatment networks.

It was another lovely field trip!