A Bridge of Sighs, Size, and Seizure

The road not taken is sometimes a literal thing. That is something I learned when I attempted to understand the history of the I-390 bridge that soars over the Genesee River.

But before getting to that, I must also confess that sometimes the blog not written is a literal thing. It’s now been over over six months since I published the last post, and since blogs are inherently personal forums, I feel I owe an explanation to my readers if not to myself. In short, life’s been busy. My daughter Abigail got married in a beautiful wedding in January, and she and her husband Nico moved down to South Carolina immediately after (for those of you who have read previous posts, I had a fun time visiting the Andrews Street Bridge with Abigail and Nico: https://bridgesofthegeneseeriver.wordpress.com/2021/11/03/andrews-street-bridge/). And my work got really busy as we just completed a major expansion at The Strong museum. The result was to knock me off my stride, and as sometimes happens in life, once you stop doing something that you did regularly, it’s hard to get going again. A couple of attempts since then to write the next entry proved to be false starts, yielding only the opening two sentences that begin this blog. But our major expansion opened last week, and I’m feeling a bit of wanderlust, the desire to explore some new bridges; so in order to do that I need to wrap up accounts of the ones I’ve already seen.

Besides the general busyness of life, another reason for the delay in writing this post is that the story was too big, or in fact there were probably too many stories. Writing, at least for me, is usually the act of taming my meanders. My mind wanders off in too many directions and telling a clear narrative means choosing not to explore the side paths that tempt with the prospect of pleasant vistas or exciting discoveries. In the case of the I-390 bridge through Genesee Valley Park, I had learned much that was surprising about its history through the clippings files in the local history archives of the Rochester Public Library.

The first thing that I was intrigued to discover is that the 390 bridge through Genesee Valley Park was the product, in part, of battles over the placement of the Genesee Parkway, the roadway that was meant to connect the Inner Loop and the I-390. Originally, the road was slated to go through Rochester’s South Wedge neighborhood, involving the demolition of whole neighborhoods.

People in Rochester know the South Wedge as a stable, tight-knit community that has an admirable history of supporting a diverse population with a wide range of incomes and backgrounds. The highway would likely have devastated it, as the state government moved to use eminent domain to seize houses.

List of houses slated for demolition to make way for the Genesee Expressway

A newspaper article from 1972 details the history of how it reached that point.

And yet despite the seeming inevitability of this highway project, the community did stop it, and the result was the shift of the highway location from the South Wedge to Genesee Valley Park.

Here too there was opposition. Protesters blocked bulldozers–some were even suspected of putting sugar in the gas tanks of the machinery.

And advocates for the park fought the project all the way to the United States Supreme Court.

In the end, they lost, leaving supporters to mourn the fact that the park was now going to be bisected by a major highway.

All that was, of course, prelude to the bridge being built, for it was ultimately built.

It is indeed an impressive structure, twin bridges in fact, that span the river without the benefit of piers sunk into the riverbed. The engineering is ingenious, the product of an Armenian immigrant, Konstantin Ketchek, who used a technology first developed in Germany to extend the span into space in 16-foot segments that then met in the middle.

It’s a product of its time, a moment when American governments were flush with cash to spend on signature projects and the prevailing aesthetic favored sweeping lines of concrete. It’s certainly impressive. But is it beautiful? Perhaps in an abstract sense, but it left me cold and has the effect (in part because sound barriers were added on each side) of separating drivers from the landscape–they have little idea they’re crossing a river when they drive over it.

Still, I did find the story of the engineer who designed it intriguing and interesting, and ultimately I guess I’m glad that this bridge got built rather than the highway that would have destroyed the fabric of the South Wedge. That’s one road I’m glad was never taken.

Epilogue: For those interested, here’s background on the design and construction of the bridge: