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| The Kinzie Street Railroad Bridge on the North Branch of the Chicago River (JWB, 2011) |
Crossing the river
at Kinzie Street, it’s hard to miss the railroad bridge that stands in a
permanently upraised position just north of the East Bank Club. Looking at its stark form in the
gentrified neighborhood along the North Branch of the river, you would never
guess that the structure was once the most audacious bridge in the city,
perhaps even the nation.
The bridge stands
where the first railroad bridge in Chicago crossed the river back in 1852. The site is also where the first
all-steel railroad bridge in the country was constructed in 1879. The bridge we see today is an
overhead-counterweight bascule bridge, and when it was completed in 1908 it was
the longest and heaviest bascule leaf bridge in the world.
Today it’s just a
curiosity, a museum piece that time has passed by. Using the extensive history of the bridge, compiled by the Historic American Engineering Record in 2004, it is fascinating to examine the story of the now unused railroad bridge.
The bridges in this
location have always had an important role in Chicago’s growth, going back to
the time of William B. Ogden, a guy who became rich selling real estate in the
early years, lobbied for the Illinois and Michigan canal, and oversaw the first
railroad to lay tracks in the city – the Galena and Chicago Union, which was
later consolidated with the Chicago and Northwestern with Ogden in charge of
the new line.
When the Union
Pacific completed its western line in 1868, Chicago had a connection across
Kinzie Street all the way to the west coast, the Northwestern running to Omaha
where the Union Pacific carried on.
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| The two Kinzie Street bridges between the former Apparel Center and the East Bank Club (JWB, 2011) |
There was no bridge
crossing the river when the Galena and Chicago Union began; its operations were
conducted from the west bank of the river. Four years after it began, the G&CU built a pontoon
bridge, and trains began crossing the river in 1852, ending their run at a
station on Wells Street. By 1861,
just 13 years after the railroad began, it had extended its tracks all the way
eastward to Ogden Slip and beyond that to the pier that would nearly a
half-century later become Municipal Pier, today’s Navy Pier.
The first bridge,
the pontoon structure, became obsolete in a matter of years. The next bridge, finished in 1979, was
one of the first all-steel railroad bridges in the country, fabricated with
Bessemer steel rather than wrought iron.
Because of the high sulfur and phosphorus in Bessemer steel (the problem
wasn’t solved until the advent of the open hearth process in the late-1880’s),
this bridge, too, quickly proved inadequate because of the brittleness of the
steel. A replacement was
built in 1898, but it only lasted a decade.
At this point
things began to happen in a hurry as the rapidly growing city was bursting at
the seams, nowhere more than on the river. It was clear by the beginning of 1901 that the Wells Street
Station was much too small for the passenger traffic that it was being asked to
handle. It had an additional
drawback beside its narrow lot – it was on the wrong side of the river from the
central business and hotel district of the Loop.
The Chicago and
Northwestern decided in 1905, therefore, to construct a new terminal on Madison
Street between Canal and Clinton Streets.
Chicago architects Charles S. Frost and Alfred H. Granger designed the
new station, one that could handle five times as many passengers as the old
Wells Street terminal.
The immediate
problem was solved. The Wells
Street station was sufficient to serve the freight needs of the city’s north
side, but the Kinzie Street river crossing was another matter. Three bridges now stood at this
location – the city-owned span that carried Kinzie Street across the river, the
C&NW bridge and another just to the north that belonged to the Milwaukee
Road. Ore boats by this time were
over 400 feet long, and the Secretary of War used his power under the River
and Harbor Act of 1899 to order the removal of the three Kinzie Street bridges.
Because the space
available for any bridge at this site was so small, both the city and the
C&NW chose the bascule-type bridge for replacement of the old
structures. The railroad chose the
Strauss Bascule and Bridge Company to design the new Kinzie Street crossing, at
first proposing two double-tracked bridges and eventually narrowing that down
to one double-tracked structure that would carry only freight traffic.
The bridge took
nine months to construct, six of which were spent on preparing the foundations,
that operation spanning the months of December of 1907 to May of 1908. The largest component of the structure
was the eastern abutment, which carried the entire weight of the span and its
counterweight. The Great Lakes
Dredge & Dock Company was chose to construct this section of the bridge, probably
because its plant was located on Goose Island, just a half-mile up the river.
Noteworthy in the
Strauss Bascule and Bridge Company’s design for the Kinzie Street bridge design
is that it didn’t require a pit for the counterweight, one of the many
innovations that the company’s founder, Joseph Baermann Strauss, brought to the
engineering of movable structures.
Only five-feet tall, Strauss was granted over 150 patents for designs
that involved movement and balance.
The Kinzie Street
bridge is composed of three parts:
a fixed tower, a rotating bascule leaf, and a concrete counterweight
that rotates independently of the bascule leaf. The great advantage of this design is that the main trunion,
or rotation point, is halfway up the fixed tower. The counterweight is attached to the rear arm of the bridge
so that in the closed position it rides above and behind the trunion. As the bridge swings open, the
counterweight moves down and inward without ever moving lower than the piers on
which the structure sits. Note the
diagram from the Historic North American Engineering Record in order to see how the bridge functioned during its working years.
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| Diagram of Kinzie Street Bridge operation (HAER, 2004) |
Aside from
eliminating the deep pit for the counterweight in this design, Strauss’s design
also carried another huge advantage – it could be erected in the upright
position. Because of this there
was little interference with traffic on the river, an important consideration in
light of how tight the Kinzie Street site already was. The bascule leaf of the Kinzie Street
bridge weighed about 800 tons and because the bridge was in near-perfect
balance, only two 50-horsepower direct current electric motors were required to
raise and lower it. These were
located in a shed at the top of the tower.
The last customer
for the innovative span disappeared in 1999 when The Chicago Sun Times moved
its printing plant from the site where Trump Tower currently stands to Damen
and 39th Street. Today
the bridge remains in the permanently raised position, strangely out of place
amidst the glassy towers that have replaced the old industrial corridor through
which it ran.
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| The massive ironwork of the single leaf bascule Kinzie Street Railroad Bridge (JWB, 2011) |
Absolutely
innovative when it was erected, the Kinzie Street Bridge was a significant
force in the growth of this great city, a city that passed it by long ago. Stare at it long enough, though, and
its power bores into your bones as you imagine the belching steam locomotives with
their pounding drive wheels bringing their loads into and out of a city that
grew from a small prairie hamlet into an industrial giant, making men rich
beyond imagination, a city strutting and crowing proudly about the wide-eyed promise that in this place anything is possible.
The old bridge stands as mute testimony to that promise, holding it aloft for all to see.
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