The architecture of our past

Douglas Coupland in “Polaroids of the Dead” wrote lovingly of the Lions Gate Bridge in Vancouver, how that landmark shaped the architecture of his imagination. Whether one lives in a place with such a grand landmark or not, there is bound to be some building or structure that has that effect. The World Trade Center towers filled that role for many, mostly after their fall. So many New York City landmarks shape imaginations, even for many who have never lived in the city. Bridges all over the world have this effect – a subtle visual subtext of the movie version of “The Wonder Boys” was a loving paean to the bridges of Pittsburgh. Sometimes it is hard to imagine our lives without these structures, but sometimes they are gone, just the same.
I have walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and the Golden Gate (skated up to it from Fort Point, in fact, which is a hell of a skate). I’ve been to some of the great monuments of our country. But the structures we grow up with are more intricately tied to us, more intimate and meaningful. I feel a tug just from seeing a Whipple truss bridge, hundreds of which once traversed the Erie Canal, a few of which can still be found, and which are linked to a time and place that I am linked to. But here is the structure, now a quarter-century gone, that I wish I could put back in place, just as it was:


This was the Western Gateway Bridge, seen from the Schenectady end. It was the grandest of all the bridges that had connected Schenectady across the isles of the Mohawk River with the village of Scotia. It was a long, graceful concrete structure, with lacy concrete x’s in its side walls, tall concrete light posts, lovely arched supports. It connected Schenectady to Scotia — I’d have to look up when it opened, though the 1930s seems right. It came down in 1973 or so, replaced by a low, unlovely, completely utilitarian set of steel spans that eliminated the dangerous curve so prominent in the center of the picture. Yes, cars did occasionally (or often) slide through that curve, through the wall (which I remember as held in place by steel cables) and down into the waiting Binnekill. That stream, a backwater of the Mohawk, is now gone, filled and made into parking and building space for the Schenectady County Community College, which overtook the Hotel Van Curler, seen in the foreground, once Schenectady’s premiere hotel. It still looks pretty much like that. The end of the bridge didn’t look quite this when I was young — those lovely grassy medians were gone. At the top end of the center median is a sign, which was later moved to a small park across from the hotel. The sign celebrates the founding of Schenectady with a cutout depiction of the 1690 Schenectady Massacre, a vision of violence no longer seen in civic displays but completely of a piece with our sense of the city when I was growing up. The Schenectady Massacre was a key sortie in the French and Indian War, in which French and Algonquins attacked the walled city on a winter night and murdered nearly everyone in it. We were all very proud of the massacre; in 3rd grade, we put on a play recreating it, which is hard to imagine doing in our current culture. Paul Dobradi and I portrayed Huntley and Brinkley, the NBC newsmen, reporting on the massacre, and I also played the role of Adam Vrooman, who survived the attack but watched his wife and children tomahawked before his very eyes. I put my little 8-year-old heart into it.
This is the bridge that I crossed hundreds of times — in cars, yes, but also in a perambulator, a baby stroller, on foot, on bicycle. My mother used to pop me in the pram and stroll across the bridge, every day (she says). I remember going downtown often, visiting my grandmother at the restaurant where she worked and getting a fresh, hot order of fries from the cook. We would shop in the old Wallace’s or Carl’s or Barney’s or Kresge’s or Woolworth’s — all those stores within a couple blocks of each other. Downtown Schenectady was in decay even then, but just barely. People had moved out to the suburbs and some of the shopping was going with it, but the big stores were all still downtown and it probably seemed like they always would be. It was the ’70s, and the bridge was gone, by the time downtown really crashed. GE shrank, the Crosstown Arterial changed traffic patterns, and bridges stopped being civic symbols and became ways to get cars across rivers that were a little too big to fill in. (Slowly, we are getting back to building beautiful things on the public dime, but for a long time we let utility and cost be our only design guides, and for this we should be ashamed. It is not a sin for the public to build beautiful things.)
I will always remember walking across that bridge, the concrete crumbling, looking through the criss-cross patterns down to the Mohawk River below, the wind blowing brisk and cold. That will always be the bridge that I walk.