Anybody want a bridge? If so, act now.
If no proposals come before Wednesday, Jan. 31, the India Point Railroad Bridge will be destroyed.
Spanning the mouth of the Seekonk River between the East Side of Providence and East Providence for the better part of a hundred years, the 225-foot long and 48-foot high bridge is being given away to whoever wants it. That is, if your proposal for relocation, rehabilitation and use meets the criteria of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
“Potential recipients have to be able to demonstrate their legal and financial responsibility for the bridge,” said Tom Rosato, project manager at the New England District of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.
Rosato is accepting written proposals for the bridge through Wednesday.
“It would be quite an undertaking,” he said of the relocation process.
Although the bridge itself is free, the taker would have to pay any fees involved in relocating the bridge. It is also a stipulation that the structure be used in its form, and not for scrap metal.
Last used in 1974, the bridge is one of only 25 surviving swing bridges in southern New England. Built in 1902 by Boston Bridge Works, the same company that built the Point Street Bridge, the India Point Railroad Bridge is less vital than its recently revamped younger brother.
Kathleen Atwood, the New England district archaeologist for the Army Corps of Engineers, doesn’t think there is much interest in saving the structure as an historical structure, since Providence gets what it needs in aesthetics from the Point Street Bridge.
“We figured it was worth a shot and we’d see what would happen,” she said.
In the early 1990s, the United States Coast Guard threatened the City of Providence with a $1,000 per day fine if the bridge was not removed within a number of years, as it was determined to be a navigational hazard. According to Rosato, the city still has about five years to remove it, but figured sooner would be a better idea than later.
So at the end of 2000 an ad was placed in the Providence Journal to run every Sunday in January, and twice in the biweekly national publication Engineering News- Record.
If there are no offers by Wednesday, on Feb. 9, there will be a bid opening to award a contract to a potential bidder for demolishing the structure.
The process will also include removing a sunken 92-foot long tugboat on the south side of the bridge. The tugboat named Gaspee sunk in 1938.
It remains to be seen whether any offers come through before the end of this month, but Rosato is not throwing in the towel just yet.
“I don’t see it as happening,” he said. “I personally see it being demolished sometime in March, but stranger things have happened.”
In the late 1960s when the original London Bridge was falling down, American chainsaw magnate Robert McCulloch and a friend purchased it for $2.4 million and moved it to Lake Havasu in Arizona where they reconstructed it.
India Point Railroad Bridge is not as famous, however. According to Atwood, it may not even really be missed.
When the Corps did an environmental assessment and published a public notice in 1996 of their intent to remove the structure, the only complaints received were from users of the river. The complaint was not that the bridge was of historical value, but that the bridge met a function of slowing down boat traffic.
The Corps then filed an Historic American Engineering Record through the National Park Service through the Library of Congress, which includes photographs and narrative documentation about the bridge.
“It’s kind of a standard mitigation measure we do if we’re going to be altering any historical structure in anyway,” said Atwood.
Catherine Horsey, executive director of The Providence Preservation Society said the bridge would be missed.
“Obviously it is an historic bridge because of the way it’s being advertised,” she said, “and it is a landmark in the figurative sense of the word, in that it’s a point of reference.”
In the end though, Rosato said removal is the only option.
“For the most part, we end up demolishing the historical structures after documenting them properly,” he said.
