Take a walk some time on the Ellsworth Street Bridge across the Willamette River in Albany and you’ll notice a thing or two. Or maybe not, so let me point them out.
If you’re going to ride a bike around Albany for any length of time, sooner or later you’re going to want to cross the Willamette River.
Most of the time, the 95-year-old Ellsworth Street Bridge on the Willamette River works just fine, but sometimes you wish it had another lane, or Albany had another bridge.
Here’s an odd little fact about Albany’s Ellsworth Street Bridge, now undergoing nighttime repairs. If you ignore inflation — wish you could? — dealing with damaged overhead beams is costing more than was paid to build the bridge nearly a century ago.
So what’s this bridge work that ODOT is telling us about on message boards at Albany’s two Willamette River crossings? In short, it’s a matter of fixing damaged beams on the Ellsworth Street span.
[youtube video=”GcV6ib2c9m8″] Crossing the Ellsworth Street Bridge in Albany on a bicycle can be a bit of a thrill. To make it less risky, ODOT installed a system of flashing lights when the bridge was rehabilitated in 2002. (To make a long story short, the lights are out but were supposed to be fixed shortly, […]
On the Ellsworth Bridge, no overhead lights
Driving into Albany on the Ellsworth Street Bridge on Friday night felt different, somehow. Then I saw the reason: All the overhead lights on the bridge were out, plunging the deck into darkness cut only by the headlights on the truck.
Tags: Albany Bridge, bridge lights, Ellsworth Street bridge, ODOT