HASSO HERING

This gap in the Dave Clark Path, photographed on Nov. 27, 2024, appeared over the last few weeks.

Riding my bike along the Albany riverfront, I’m on the Dave Clark Path several times a week. And lately I’ve noticed that west of the Wheelhouse Building a new gap in the path has opened up.

The gap is between two concrete sections of the path that are supported by pilings or cantilevered over the bank of the Willamette River. Maybe the gap was intended as an expansion joint, and colder weather has caused the steel in the path to contract.

Normally there’s a metal cap over the gap, but as you can see in the photo,  the cap no longer covers the space.

None of this is all that important (not nearly as important in the news as the tentative settlement of the Albany teacher strike announced Sunday night). But if the gap keeps getting bigger, some kind of repair will have to be made.

This section of the riverfront path was built about 2010, when the Wheelhouse was constructed on the former site of the old Buzz Saw restaurant. Before that time, the path veered south toward the old Oregon Electric Railway track in order to skirt the restaurant.

This spot is not the only place where the path could use some attention. Some of the older sections have cracked and shifted. Only the section in Monteith Riverpark is new, rebuilt as part of the park’s renovation completed this year.

From Monteith Riverpark in the west to Front Street in the east, the bike and pedestrian path is roughly a mile long. As part of the Central Albany Revitalization Area’s $21.5 million Waterfront Project, the city paid for landscaping and new access points along the route, but not for repairing the path itself. (hh)