Veterans Memorial Bridge

By the end of 1931, the United States had already endured two years of the Great Depression. Herbert Hoover was President, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s great building initiatives under the New Deal would not start until he took office at the start of 1933. And yet Rochester had a foretaste of this massive construction push with the opening of the Veterans Memorial Bridge on December 26, 1931.

The bridge itself had been first conceived in 1928, not as a public relief measure but instead as a way to improve transportation in the heady days of the roaring twenties. Rochester was booming. The growth of Kodak and other companies spurred a doubling of the city’s population, from 163,000 in 1900 to 325,000 in 1930; employment at Kodak alone grew from 8,000 employees in 1915 to 23,000 in 1934. The demand for workers created an urgent need for better transportation across the Genesee River.

Veterans Memorial Bridge, the next bridge I visited as part of my project to visit every bridge over the Genesee River, was meant to remediate this need to transport workers, and it still serves this crucial purpose for thousands of travelers every day who cross it to and from work, including my wife Ursula who travels over it to her nursing job in Greece. It carries Route 104, the highway that roughly matches the glacial ridge that marked the old boundaries of what was a larger version of Lake Ontario before the end of the last ice age.

I went this time with two of my sons–Jacob and Jonathan–and as with the Clean Waters Bridge we parked in the north section of Maplewood Park on the west side of the river. From there we crossed an elegant pedestrian overpass before descending onto the south sidewalk of the bridge. At that point, we began walking along the sidewalk and realized that the Veterans Memorial Bridge is very much made for automobiles, not pedestrians. Cars whizzed by and one misstep seemed certain to mean instant disaster.

If the roadway itself was miserable, the view to the south towards the Driving Park Bridge is wonderful, even on a cold, grey day.

View looking south towards Driving Park Bridge

But despite the magnificent view, up to this point this was not a bridge I could love or, for that matter, even like that much. The traffic was loud, close, and dangerous. I needed a new perspective to really appreciate this bridge, and thankfully I soon got two new ways of thinking about this bridge.

First of all, on the east side of the river I learned more about the bridge’s backstory. A snow-covered boulder with a historical plaque in front of the high-rise Seneca Towers describes the original village of Carthage that once stood on this bank of the river. LIke many historical markers of the first half of the twentieth century, it celebrates the heroic exploits of the white pioneers in florid prose. “Stout arms subdued the wilderness and built Carthage here” it begins, before extolling the virtues of the settlement of Carthage to such an extent that one might be excused for thinking this small hamlet that was subsumed into present-day Rochester and Irondequoit was of equal importance to its Punic namesake.

Two large monuments flanking both sides of the roadway deal more directly with the bridge itself. On the south side of the road a starkly modernist structure (it wouldn’t have looked out of place in Fascist Italy) honors the Rochester soldiers for whom the bridge is named.

The badly faded inscription in the center of the monument reads “DESIGNATED BY THE COUNCIL NOVEMBER 23 1931 IN HONOR OF THE BRAVE MEN OF ROCHESTER AND MONROE COUNTY WHO GAVE THEIR LIVES IN THE SERVICE OF THEIR COUNTRY.”

We then crossed St. Paul Street. Jacob suggested jokingly (I think) that we try and “Frogger it” across the road, but instead we opted for the overpass that gave a good view of the roadway as well as a good idea of what a Frogger experience would have been like (for those of you unfamiliar with Frogger, it was an arcade video game immortalized in a Seinfeld sketch, in which a frog has to try and cross a busy road without getting hit).

View of Rt. 104 facing west

On the north side of the road is another large monument, this time dedicated to the people who oversaw the building of the bridge.

Monument for builders of the bridge

Many of the people involved in designing and erecting the bridge–the architects, contractors, and chief engineer–came from Pennsylvania. The construction company–Booth & Flinn–dug many of the tunnels and built many other structures in Pittsburgh. The civil engineer Frank McKibben wrote an essay “Bridges and Poetry: A Plea for More Emphasis on Esthetics in Design” in the Feb. 1932 issue of Civil Engineering (v. 2, no. 2) and followed that up with a letter to the editor in the July issue of the same magazine in which he described his desire when building the Veterans Memorial Bridge to make something beautiful as well as stable:

“The chief structural features of the bridge are a central semicircular span of 300 ft., flanked on each side by three arches varying from 50-58 ft.; solid spandrels; ‘filler’ walls between the arch ribs; and stone facing on the principal exposed surfaces of arches, piers, and abutments. The modern reinforced concrete skeleton is covered by solid spandrel and ‘filler’ walls, thus creating a bridge characteristically Roman in appearance. This similarity to ancient classic designs is heightened by wide piers, semi-circular arches, and curved, instead of stepped, extradosal treatment of the voussoirs. In the Veterans Memorial Bridge, an attempt has been made to satisfy the requirements of both adaptability and beauty.”

The marvelous Albert Stone photo archives held by the Rochester Public Library and Rochester Museum and Science Center have more than 40 photos of the bridge under construction. Here are a few:

I didn’t know any of this background while visiting the bridge, but I didn’t truly appreciate the bridge as a structure while I walking across it. The return walk for me across the Veterans Memorial Bridge felt just as hazardous as the first walk, though the view again was wonderful, this time looking towards the Clean Waters Bridge I wrote about in my last blog.

North view of bridge towards Clean Waters Bridge

It was only when I went under the bridge, however, that I really appreciated what a marvelous structure it is. It did feel, as the builders intended, like an ancient Roman structure such as the Pont du Gard in the south of France.

South side of the Veterans Memorial Bridge

Jacob and Jonathan under the bridge

It’s a pity that it’s so hard to appreciate this beautiful bridge when you’re driving over it, but it was a pleasure to discover how handsome a structure graces the Genesee River.