This column was originally published in The Seattle Press on October 6, 1999.
In 1932, my grandmother held a banner along with six other young women inviting people to the George Washington Memorial Bridge dedication. I’ve heard that the women were all local beauty queens. My grandmother denied that fact, in her case. I don’t believe her. I know she was beautiful.
She said her boss at the Green Lake Bank, in desperate need of a “Miss Green Lake”, chose her. She invited people to the George Washington (Aurora) Bridge and, soon after that, Fremont would become the center of her universe. Would she have refused had she known what the Aurora Bridge would mean to those of us below it?
The neighborhood that lay in its shadow actually suffered from its erection. It may not have killed us, but it sent us into a long, deep sleep.
The Stats Of Bridge Crossings
In the 1920’s, Fremont was a thriving community. In 1930, over 34,000 vehicles crossed the Fremont Bridge expanse on an average weekday. Then, above Fremont, the Aurora Bridge was built, and in 1934 only 13,000 cars went across.
Where we’d had two drugstores in the ‘20’s, we had none by 1940. The 1960’s saw the neighborhood retail area boarded up and drugs and drunks invaded. When the Ship Canal Bridge was finished, Interstate 5 became the efficient way to travel, and the number of vehicles crossing our bridge plunged again.
It is only now, in the vital Fremont of the ‘90’s, that traffic has returned to ‘normal.’ In 1995, for the first time since 1930, the Fremont Bridge saw 34,000 vehicles drive across its deck.
The bridge has returned to its former activity, as has the neighborhood. The bridge has also been receiving some long needed repairs. It was built across the Lake Washington Ship Canal between 1915 and 1917. It replaced an ancient wooden structure that could be called a bridge, if you stretched the definition.
Now we have a ‘bascule’ bridge. The term means “teeter-totter” and refers to the 780-ton counterweight located on each of the two independent leaves of the Bridge.
Recently the differential gear that controls the counterweight was replaced and now a raft with scaffolding floats beneath the bridge. An understanding contractor is making repairs to the decking, without closing the bridge entirely.
Each leaf of the bridge has a motor and many more gears that are activated three to four times an hour lifting and lowering the heavy structure. The gears are the same as those used in sawmills, and most are original equipment.
Not everything has stayed the same, however. Nowadays, bridge staff are on-call 24 hours a day in case of power outage – so they can open the bridge using a 20 horsepower gas engine and a four-person walkie-talkie relay. Until the 1940’s, during a power outage, a capstan wheel would be placed in the middle of Fremont Avenue and hand-turned by six big, strong men to lift one half of the Bridge.
When The Bridge Goes Up
Eufemio “Pete” Miramontez is one of our ‘Bridge Tenders’ who make the Fremont Bridge go up and down. From his perch, at the Southeast corner of the Bridge, Pete watches cars and boats come and go.
At the signal, either by horn or radio, that a boat needs the bridge raised, Pete turns on a clanging warning bell. He changes the traffic signal lights and carefully lowers the barricades to stop the cars. Too many times a day cars and pedestrians try to “run” the barricades. Once traffic stops, Pete will turn levers and press buttons to raise each side of the bridge simultaneously. His panel contains two of each control, one for each leaf of the bridge.
Pete has become practiced at keeping the farthest leaf, the northern one, slightly ahead of the nearer one so that he can visually track its progress rather than entirely relying on two gauges that show the ascent and decent of each leaf.
It isn’t a difficult job, once you remember every vital detail. Each step, each lever turning and each button pressing must be done in a particular order at a particular time. It takes 4 minutes, most times, between the signal light changes from red to green, to raise the bridge and let fishing vessels or luxury yachts go by.
Four minutes, three or four times an hour, can be a lot if you are in a car, and anxious to be somewhere. Most drivers will tell you that the bridge goes up far too often. Actually, it is opening less than it used to. In July of 1974, the bridge opened for 1449 boats. Ship traffic decreased in the 1980’s, and by July of 1998 the bridge opened 884 times. In the wintertime, the number of vessels requiring the bridge to open drops off even more.
Obviously, the bridge is very important to many people – the boats that cross beneath it, the cars that pass over it, and the many of us that live and work beside it, dependent on having it as a way to bring people to Fremont and keep our business district alive.
Kirby Lindsay is grateful to Joanne McGovern, Bob Roseberry and Steve Louie, of the City of Seattle, and Jim Neidigh of History House who helped her research this column, plus the Washington State Department of Transportation and the Seattle Municipal Archives for photos.
©2013 Kirby Lindsay. This column is protected by intellectual property laws, including U.S. copyright laws. Reproduction, adaptation or distribution without permission is prohibited.