Recent Highlights
August 14, 2007. Lots of great photos have been uploaded in the last few months. Here are some highlights. - Patrick S. O'Donnell was in attendance for the Third Tacoma Narrows opening festivities in mid-July. Check out his new photos:
- I was recently in California for a family vacation. I didn't get to too many bridges, but Eric Sakowski and I met up for a half-day bridging trip around the Los Angeles area. We visited the famous Colorado Street Bridge in Pasadena, a high arch bridge in the mountains, and four suspension pipeline bridges (Soledad Canyon, Santa Clarita, Hungry Valley, and Castaic.
- While in California, I did get to walk onto the Golden Gate Bridge with my wife and son. This was the first major suspension bridge he had walked onto (especially since he's only been walking for three months!). Scroll to the end of my Golden Gate Bridge page to see Mrs. Bridgemeister and Bridgemeister Jr.
- On July 1st, I was questioned by Philadelphia's finest while photographing the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
- Patrick continued to send gobs of great bridge photos including those of the George Washington Bridge, Bear Mountain Bridge, Mid-Hudson Bridge, the Kingston-Port Ewen Bridge and the old suspension bridge towers at Beebe, Washington.
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Overdue Updates
August 4, 2007. I just uploaded some long overdue updates that had been pending since early July. My apologies to everyone to whom I promised updates by mid-July. The delay was caused by a dispute with my web hosting company. They disabled a feature I was using to refresh the database that contains all of the inventory and photo information. In the end, I had to significantly rework the way I refresh the database. If you notice anything strange or out-of-the-ordinary, please send me an email (address at the bottom of this page). Thanks.
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Spring Cleaning
April 28, 2007. I just completed a major refurbishing of the underlying HTML for the site eliminating a lot of old mistakes and making it easier for me to make future changes. If all went well, you should not notice any changes except for the correction of some font inconsistencies. If you do notice anything strange or out-of-the-ordinary, please send me an email (address at the bottom of this page). Thanks.
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April Showers
April 25, 2007. With some free time on his hands in March and April, Patrick S. O'Donnell spent most of April inundating me with photos and information for bridges in Arizona, Colorado, Kentucky, North Carolina, West Virginia, and elsewhere. Thus far this April, I have added more than 900 new photos from Patrick. By the end of the month the total will be closer to 1,100. Here's a rundown of some recent highlights:- On March 30th, Patrick and I met up for a short one-day bridge trip around northeastern Pennsylvania. This was the first time we had bridged together since meeting at the Patapsco Valley State Park Swinging Bridge several years ago. The main purpose of the trip was my interest in the Glendon Change Bridge. There isn't much left of that bridge, but it is one of the oldest North American suspension bridges of which there are major remnants. We also stopped at the Lumberville, Riegelsville, and Saucon Creek suspension bridges, and the Delaware River and Paulinskill Viaducts.
- Patrick S. O'Donnell did a quick 5,000-mile road trip to see the Verde River Sheep Bridge in Arizona. Don't worry, he sent plenty of photos and even more photos. Coincidentally, just about the same time Patrick was racing across the country to visit this bridge, Norm Johnson sent his 1982 photos of the old Verde River Sheep Bridge.
- There are so many goodies in Patrick's recent submissions that you should just explore for yourself, but if you have limited time, don't miss Patrick's photos of the beautifully restored Pauley Suspension Bridge, the large derelict Lawson Suspension Bridge, the very high Royal Gorge Suspension Bridge, and of course, the aforementioned Verde River Sheep Bridge.
- Eckhard Bernstorff is still sending information and photos for past and present suspension bridges of Germany such that the inventory now lists more than 100 suspension bridges for Germany.
- Stuart Brorson and a cohort did some detective work to find the location of the Tyngs Island Vesper Country Club Suspension Bridge near Lowell, Masachusetts and sent a lengthy description of their findings.
- Travis Sparks sent photos of the beautifully restored Androscoggin Swinging Bridge between Topsham and Brunswick, Maine.
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Unified Snapshots
April 25, 2007. Effective immediately, my photographs (David Denenberg's, that's me) have been integrated into the old "Contributions" page to form a unified snapshots page. If, for some reason, you are still interested in viewing my photos separately, you can still use the old My Snapshots page, but there will be no other links to that page as you navigate through the site.
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Recent Highlights
January 15, 2007. Some recent updates you may find interesting:
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Reconciliations
January 15, 2007. You may have noticed a new inventory feature in late 2006. Titled "Reconciliations," this is my attempt to match (reconcile) bridges listed in other well-known suspension bridge lists to the bridgemeister.com historical suspension bridge inventory. I previously published one reconciliation against David Steinman's suspension bridge list. You can view it here. Today, I added a draft reconciliation against the main section of Jakkula's suspension bridge list. You can access the reconciliations from the main inventory page. The annotated side-by-side format should be helpful if you are interested in comparing lists, if you are curious why I omitted a bridge, or you are looking for historical bridges I have not yet added to the inventory.
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Bridgemeister 3,000?
January 15, 2007. Frequent visitors to bridgemeister.com may be interested in some statistics I recently gathered about the site. As of early 2007: - The suspension bridge inventory lists 2,124 bridges, of which 877 have at least one associated image.
- 1,067 sets of images are associated to the 2,124 bridges in the inventory.
- 638 bridges have latitude and longitude coordinates.
- 1,284 bridges are listed with a year of completion.
- There are 1,319 total sets of images (including the non-suspension bridge pages).
- 688 sets of images are contributed, 324 of which are from Patrick S. O'Donnell.
- There are 7,251 total bridge images (approximately 3,070 of which are from Patrick).
When I first started the inventory (September, 1998) listing approximately 110 bridges, I don't think I could have conceived of the list growing to more than 2,000 bridges. Now, 3,000 bridges seems attainable. I doubt I will reach 3,000 bridges in time for the site's 10-year anniversary, but I am convinced that 3,000 bridges can be identified without altering my criteria. The most important thing to remember is that the growth of the site has been fueled by your contributions of information and images. Reaching 3,000 bridges will not be possible without your continued support. For that, I am thankful. Keep up the good work!
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Updates, Maps, and the Cosumnes River
September 10, 2006. Contribution and Inventory updates were uploaded September 10, 2006. Thanks to everyone who has contributed recently.
As suggested last week, I changed the format of the Location section in the inventory. Hyperlinks for maps now appear under the location coordinates. Links are provided for both MapQuest and Acme Mapper.
Thanks to Bill Campbell who contributed photos of several famous bridges in England, Scotland, and Wales.
I sorted out several collected bits of information about the 1850's suspension bridges of California's Cosumnes River. It appears there were at least three early suspension bridges crossing the Cosumnes. Two of them (Huse and Wilson's) appear to predate the 1856 Bidwell Bar Bridge (often recognized as the first suspension bridge built in California). Many thanks to Don Sayenga and Barry Parr who have both sent me much information about these two bridges and locations.
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Updates and Maps
September 3, 2006. Contribution and Inventory updates were uploaded August 26 and September 3, 2006. Thanks to everyone who has contributed recently. Some highlights:- Patrick O'Donnell has exceeded 300 contribution pages. More than 2,700 of his photographs can be found on this site. Check his recent contributions for the latest installment of photos from his most recent large bridge trip.
- Ralph Trepal, resident engineer for the 1971 demolition of the eyebar suspension-truss hybrid Saint Marys suspension bridge sent photos and information about the demolition.
- Eric Sakowski sent a photo of a historical display at the New River Gorge Bridge showing an interesting old suspension bridge used by a lumber company to haul rail cars full of lumber across the New River.
- Patrick O'Donnell found the suspension bridge at Graham Park in Carroll, Iowa is not really a suspension bridge.
- Patrick O'Donnell visited the huge pipeline suspension bridge at Ponca, Nebraska, but with its huge droop, is it inventory worthy? I say "No." What's your opinion?
- Patrick O'Donnell pondered "8 short blasts" at the Ryan Island Day Use Area Suspension Footbridge below Ryan Dam near Great Falls, Montana. Patrick also went climbing again, this time in Yellowstone Park. See the views from above here and here.
- Darrin Williams is fairly certain that my recently posted unidentified suspension bridge is Missouri's Linn Creek Suspension Bridge.
- The historic South Fork Mule bridge near Hyampom, California is threatened with removal. Mary Renaker of the "Committee to Save the Mule Bridge" writes "Trinity County and the Forest Service would like to abandon the Mule Bridge. Hyampom had a town meeting about this and everyone was opposed to the removal of the bridge which has been a part of our community since 1913."
- The Kellams-Stalker Suspension Bridge across the Delaware River was damaged by floodwaters in late June, 2006. It's closed indefinitely.
I made a change to the Location links that appear in the Inventory -- the decimalized Latitude and Longitude links. I previously linked to MapQuest, but I'm trying ACME Mapper 2.0 on a trial basis. ACME Mapper 2.0 is a nice Web 2.0 mashup of Google Maps and Microsoft's Terraserver allowing you to easily switch back and forth between Google's maps, satellite images, Terraserver's USGS topographical maps, and Terraserver's satellite images. Another advantage is that it loads Terraserver's images much faster than Terraserver does. If you've ever used Microsoft's Terraserver, you know how agonizing it is waiting for the image tiles to load. The one major disadvantage I see to ACME Mapper is that Google's street maps are often not as detailed as MapQuest's maps. MapQuest tends to show more roads and more place names. The ACME Mapper topographical maps are no substitute for road maps because they are often 20-30 years old. I will likely end up offering links to both sites from the inventory.
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Updates
August 20, 2006. Several updates were uploaded today.
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Welcome
July 30, 2006. Welcome to the Announcements page. This page will be used to alert you to www.bridgemeister.com content and feature updates as well as general announcements of interest to www.bridgemeister.com visitors. This page will not replace the Inventory Log page which will continue to provide a detailed list of recent inventory modifications.
If you're new to the site, there are three main sections:
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