Some people wonder about the bridge on Fifth. The very first bridge was built in 1874. Then the second bridge was built in 1900. It was a wooden bridge. The first steel bridge was built in 1923, and then the bridge we’ve got now was built in ‘59/60 and all of them basically in the same spot. Then there was a slough bridge, and the 17th Street bridge was built in ’81.
About the 1923 bridge, when they decided, measured and did all the engineering, they brought two barges up the river, calculated it all out, at low tide, and then put timbers on the two barges. They had two tugs and then at high tide around midnight, they pulled the bridge up the river and from about midnight to seven in the morning you couldn’t cross the river there. We sat in a fire truck all night in case there was a fire on the other side of the river, and that was in 1959. So that bridge, then, was our route across the river while they constructed the one we’ve got now.
Lawrence Burns
how many bridges was that?