Looking Back: From streakers to stuck traffic, Charlevoix bridge has seen it all
Fourth and last in a series recognizing the 75th anniversary of the dedication of Charlevoix’s current Memorial Bridge on July 30, 1949.
CHARLEVOIX — The past three Looking Back have looked back at the need for our current bridge, its construction, and how that two-year period of industrial activity affected the community. This final installment will tell a few tales of both high and low drama about the bridge since then.
Once, in the early years, on a torrid summer day it opened and stayed that way for quite a while. The two leaves, or roadbeds, were up long enough for the steel to expand in the heat; when they were lowered, the leaves wouldn’t mesh properly. An older resident recalled that this had happened with the fourth bridge a few times. The solution then, and now, was to call the fire department and use cold channel water to hose down the swollen ends in order for the steel to shrink back. It might take an hour, but the solution worked.
On another torrid August day, in 1987, the bridge opened at 12:30 p.m., then a high voltage switch on the south side of the channel blew, affecting some 400 businesses and homes plus the bridge. Traffic started to back up and eventually reached beyond the city limits on both sides of town. The combined lines of vehicles stretched an estimated five miles in length. A crew of eight, including the police chief and workmen on the new Edgewater Inn, assembled to hand crank the bridge back down, crews of two plus backup under each of the bridge’s four corners.
In the scorching midday heat, in cramped sauna-like quarters, they could only turn a few revolutions before having to stop from exhaustion. After 40 minutes of work, the beast was tamed just as the power came back on at 1:40 p.m. But the bridge had to reopen immediately to let a backlog of vessels pass. After 90 minutes, vehicles full of enraged, perspiring drivers began to crawl across the bridge and the jam-up gradually dissipated. T-shirts were produced proclaiming survival of the gridlock of 1987.
In 1988, after a few rejected grandiose and expensive plans, the state spent a mere $9,000 for simple electrical switching equipment that could utilize another circuit should one of the two main power lines that junction at the bridge ever go out again.
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Any time the bridge malfunctions while open, many drivers opt to travel the 40-odd miles around Lake Charlevoix through Boyne City and East Jordan.
Bridgetender Chick Gallagher had to explain to inquirers, more than once, why the bridge sidewalks had to go up the same time as the roadbeds.
When the bridge was new in 1949, Hooker’s Horses were a daily sight in summer passing through town from their stable at Antrim and State streets, now Oleson’s loading dock area. They clomped up State to Park Avenue, swung a right to Bridge Street, then a left to the bridge. They’d been doing this for years, headed for their destination paddock at Burns and Division streets for resorter and tourist equine recreational purposes. On the bridge’s new openwork mesh roadbed, some of them had to be hooded so they wouldn’t be spooked and bolt. Or the horses might cross on canvas tarps laid across the grating so they wouldn’t see the water directly below them.
In July of 1973 the bridge was raised 1,166 times. Over a 27-year career between 1971 and 1998, bridgetender Charley Bergmann estimated that he alone had raised the bridge about 91,000 times. For 2022, Michigan Department of Transportation statistics reveal that the bridge went up in the neighborhood of 3,400 times.
Streakers running across it when streaking was a fad, daredevils dressed only in their skivvies diving into the channel from the bridge railing and not getting caught, Evel Knievels threading around the lowered traffic gates and racing their motorcycles over the widening central gap as the bridge begins to open, automotive titan Ransom E. Olds, founder of Oldsmobile and a summer resident of Charlevoix for 25 years, bemoaning the low buzzing sound that car tires made when they crossed the grating as “the groans of the taxpayers,” an overlooked dog once raised into the air on the south leaf sidewalk — our Memorial Bridge has seen it all. Newly refurbished earlier this year, with tender loving care it should be good for another 75 years of unique sights and sounds.
Oh, by the way, give a stab at how many vehicles crossed the bridge in 2022. MDOT statistical procedures guesstimate the number is around 5,225,000. Understandable when trying to get onto Bridge Street from the Oleson’s corner, even on a Sunday morning in February. Take some time sometime and just go down there and watch what goes over the bridge, loved, tolerated and loathed as it has been for the last seven-plus decades.
To recognize this important anniversary year, on Tuesday, July 16 this writer and the Charlevoix Historical Society will be presenting a completely illustrated program on the eventful history of all six of Charlevoix’s lower channel bridges at the Charlevoix Public Library Community Room, 6 p.m., admission free. Call (231) 547-0373 for more information.
This article originally appeared on The Petoskey News-Review: Looking Back: From streakers to stuck traffic, Charlevoix bridge has seen it all
