Each bridge contains multitudes. Think of the stories. There’s the physical setting, the flow of the river, the slope of the land, the human built environment that sets the scene. There’s the bridge itself–the engineering, the architecture, and the materials. And there’s the people. The people who imagined the bridge in the first play and saw a need for it. The people who designed it, who built it, and who maintain it. And there are the people who use it, some crossing frequently, some perhaps only once. Each person has a unique story–stories of love and loss, happiness and gloom, tedium and excitement, stories that are different each time they cross the bridge.
When I write these blogs, I have to choose among the universe of possible stories for each bridge. Is there something visually that captures my fancy? Is it the name that piques my curiousity, as was the case with the Patrick O’Rorke or Driving Park bridges? Maybe there’s something about its history that I learn in the course of researching and writing the blog that inspires me. Or maybe it’s more personal: my mood that day or the people with whom I’m visiting the bridge.
When I visit a new bridge or start to write a blog about it, one of the first things that quickly happens is that I begin considering the “angle” (to use a word often used in journalism) I want to take on it. How do I want to consider it? Of all the possible stories I can tell, which should I tell? Once I decide on how I want to approach the subject, the next step is determining if I can develop something interesting out of it. First off, it needs to be interesting to me. After all, I’m doing this for fun, not profit. I’m putting the lie to the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson’s famous quip that “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.” Or perhaps I’m just a blockhead!
I also don’t want to repeat the same sorts of things I’ve written in previous blogs. Again, that would be boring for me, let alone the reader. And while I do some research on every blog, there are limits to how much research I can do. Life is busy, and there are a lot of bridges to visit.
So why this extended preface about my motivations and methods? Because for the Inner Loop bridge, I had a difficult time picking one story to tell, either because story lines I pursued only interested me a little or because I realized I’d need to a lot more digging to find out more about the subject. So in this blog I’d like to tell multiple stories, each in somewhat abbreviated fashion.
My first thought was to make this about the Inner Loop itself. For those from outside Rochester, the Inner Loop is a highway system that girdles the center city. Conceptualized and built in the 1950s and 1960s during the heyday of Kodak, when Rochester was a larger city with brighter hopes than today, it was a form of urban renewal that was taking place all over the country. Robert Moses did this most famously in New York City, where he planned grand expressways and major developments that bulldozed whole neighborhoods, often with little sympathy for the people who lived there.
There are a lot of potential stories about the construction of the inner loop. The planning and excitement when it was first being built. The destruction of the neighborhoods and buildings that lay in its path (often used by people who had little power to resist these changes). Its ultimate failure as a transportation system from the perspective of usage. And the very exciting efforts to refill it today, including an initiative I’m involved in through my work at The Strong museum to build a Neighborhood of Play on land reclaimed when a submerged portion of the loop was filled in. If you’re interested in learning more about the history of the Inner Loop, I discovered a good blog that describes its construction and the neighborhoods that were displaced.
When I actually visited the bridge, however, the thing that interested me the most was the way that it was clearly designed as an adjunct to the overall flood control system for the Genesee River. The massive concrete piers are rounded–seemingly out of proportion for a bridge that is actually quite small–shunting the water to the side in whirling eddies that swooped to each side.
Each gap between the piers had a sluice gate that could be raised or lowered with pulleys and cables. Measurements along the side indicated how high the water was.
In the end, however, I couldn’t readily find much information on how these flood control systems worked, so I felt that this part of the story was a dead end unless I wanted to do a lot more research searching for information.
When poking around the internet, however, I uncovered a story that I hadn’t expected to read. In 2015, New York State launched a multimillion dollar project to repair the bridge. That June, David Campbell, a worker for the Pike Company, the contractor doing the renovations, was working on a boat in the river. His boat tipped over, he fell in, and his safety line became tangled up with one of the abutments, trapping him under the water. A resident of Batavia, he left a wife and three children, and it is still heart rending to read the comments from the Go Fund Me campaign to raise money to help his family. I’m sure other lives were lost in the construction of other bridges over the Genesee, but because this one happened so recently it felt more powerful.
I’m sure if I had more time I would uncover more stories (for example about Brown’s Race, the manmade channel that was dug here to power many of the mills in High Falls). Or I could have written about the historic architecture along one side of the river and the nice view of downtown. But I think three stories are enough for one bridge.
Bridges of the Genesee River 
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