Second in a set of essays about one of Tacoma, Washington’s abandoned bridges.
Ramps to Nowhere
by S.T. Lile
In an apparently continuing effort to gentrify Dock Street and the Thea Foss Waterway, they’ve improved the sidewalks all the way to the base of the 11th Street/Murray Morgan Bridge. They’re wider. There are bolt-studded concrete stumps where streetlights will one day be. Saplings have been planted in yawning squares, their roots reaching for fertile ground. Rising above that last bit of new sidewalk are the steel legs of the bridge. Some grey, some green, some spotted with rust and moss, the legs press skyward to support the span of roadway high above. Yet laced among them are a series of dangling ramps that hang useless and forgotten due to the amputation of their active ends. What were they for?
The answer was difficult to find—and there may be more pieces out there still—but old photographs and a morning of urban archaeology revealed the basic story. The clues—old dots in a connect-the-dot urban mystery—were there, hidden beneath the street surface and in the raw edges of the aged ramps themselves. Those crackled layers of wood, asphalt and steel pointed to a second use for the bridge structure, that of access to what had once been a line of Dock Street flourmills on the waterfront below. Hundreds of people worked in those mills until one by one the mills burned and failed to be rebuilt. Albers Mill, blocks away and transformed into loft apartments, is a lone survivor.
I knew about the flourmills from photographs found at the Tacoma Public Library. First I searched for pictures of the bridge itself. Then for Dock Street, the road that runs beneath it. Then for Cliff Street, Bayside Avenue, and Schuster Parkway—all streets that do or did once run perpendicular to the bridge’s 11th Street entrance. I found all sorts of photos—floods of pedestrians walking to work over in the tide flats, Dock Street flour mill workers, postcard shots of the bridge’s mid-span lifted to allow the entrance of Old Ironsides, and a few distant cityscapes showing a ramp sliding down from the underpinnings of the bridge to the street below. Those photographs confirmed my suspicion that cars had once sullied their way from one level to the next on a switch back route beneath the bridge.
It’s been a long time, however, since the ramps have felt the burn of rubber tires. Based on the photos, it’s been a good 30-40 years. This morning as I hiked the stairway from docks to bridge, I marveled at the tenacity of Tacoma’s flora. A sword fern fanned out from a crack in the stairway roof support. Moss blanketed whole stretches of buckled asphalt, willing it into fertile soil for grass and blackberry vines. Pigeon poop and rust-defying paint mingled on the metal supports, camouflaging the original latticework of the ramps’ siderails. Nature is winning.
And after 95 years, perhaps that’s as it should be. One look upward from the lower level of stairs, and you have to fight the vertigo that rickety heights inspire. A train passes on the tracks below and the whole structure shimmies. The pigeons flutter. The wood planks under the buckling asphalt creak. You know then why the bridge is closed to cars.
Once at the top, I walk along the pitted roadway now blocked with orange striped barrels and concrete barriers. I’m looking for what I’ve missed twenty walks before—the clue that confirms my suspicion that the ramps once joined Cliff Street for cars and pedestrians alike. Steps to the right of the bridge beckon. I follow them down below the surface of the bridge to a forgotten tunnel that slides past a reeking dumpster and reaches, if only in my imagination, for that old dangling, rotten ramp. I can see the dots of road and ramp connected now, despite the concrete supports of Schuster Parkway. Cars on one side, people on the other. It had been a clever solution for accessing the waterfront far below.
Although a quiet relic now that the new 509 bridge is open, the Murray Morgan still owns the waterway. Tall ships must call ahead to have the bridge lifted as its operator has been reassigned to Hood Canal. Its metal skeleton stretches prominently from shore to shore, accented by an operator’s house and a little guard shack. The walls of the shack are streaked with graffiti and a flagger’s SLOW sign peeks through windows blurry with grime. But the bridge still stands, clues to its age evident to those who look.
And one doesn’t have to look far. Nineteen twelve appears on the grayed-out commemorative plaques at either end of the bridge. Nineteen fifty-six is imprinted in the concrete balustrades at the tide flat end. Built and modified over time, the Murray Morgan faces potential death despite the efforts of Tacoma’s city council. Rumor has it that certain council members chained themselves to the bridge in an effort to save it, but I can’t say whether that’s true. All that’s visible to me now are ramps to nowhere, except, perhaps, back through time.
