{"id":1421,"date":"2009-07-26T23:09:03","date_gmt":"2009-07-27T06:09:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/?p=1421"},"modified":"2009-08-07T17:06:23","modified_gmt":"2009-08-08T00:06:23","slug":"bridging-obsessions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2009\/07\/26\/bridging-obsessions\/","title":{"rendered":"Bridging obsessions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Given my recent obsession with a local bridge – Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge<\/a>, a bascule bridge designed by Joseph Strauss (see my article, Blue Bridge blues<\/a>) – it makes sense that I’d be enthralled by manager magazin.de<\/a>‘s article on Hamburg’s storied bridges<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Granted, Victoria has nothing<\/em> on Hamburg in the bridge department: the latter is, as the magazine puts it, Europe’s most “bridge-rich” city, boasting a total of 2500 bridges. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century alone, 1000 new bridges got built (and presumably nearly as many destroyed by 1945, which is conflated to “mid-20th century” by the magazine article…)<\/p>\n

One might also add that, given Victoria’s relative bridge-paucity as compared to a city like Hamburg’s bridge-richness, it seems all the more relevant to preserve the storied bridge we have, right? Our civic leaders, however, apparently don’t feel that way and say, “bombs away!” and “buh-bye Blue Bridge.”<\/p>\n

Anyway, the magazine article provides illustrations from an exhibition now on view in Hamburg at the Museum der Arbeit<\/a>, Hamburg und seine Bruecken – Baukunst, Technik, Geschichte bis 1945<\/a>. The exhibition documents some amazing bridges. Here are a couple of them:
\n\"Nordelbbruecke
\nThis amazing structure (from 1872) combines rail and automotive transport. According to manager magazin.de, the photo was taken in 1950, but I’m not clear if the bridge still exists.<\/p>\n

Here’s another one:
\n\"Elbbruecke<\/p>\n

This photo is from 1915 and it looks as though this bridge is having some work done to it. Again, no idea if it’s still extant.<\/p>\n

Finally, this one:
\n\"Portal<\/p>\n

It shows a Portal (1884-87) to what looks like the same bridge we see in the previous photo, except that the portal is a delirious Victorian-Gothic work of imperialist architecture, behind which a sort of Rapunzel-like stream of riveted steel flows abundantly …and meets another foreboding portal on the other side.<\/p>\n

It makes Post-modernism look like a walk in the park – and us moderns like unimaginative Dilberts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Given my recent obsession with a local bridge – Victoria’s Johnson Street Bridge, a bascule bridge designed by Joseph Strauss (see my article, Blue Bridge blues) – it makes sense that I’d be enthralled by manager magazin.de‘s article on Hamburg’s storied bridges. Granted, Victoria has nothing on Hamburg in the bridge department: the latter is, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6171,1418],"tags":[8676,2797,8677,1021,64781],"class_list":["post-1421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-johnson-street-bridge","category-victoria","tag-bridges","tag-exhibitions","tag-hamburg","tag-infrastructure","tag-johnson-street-bridge"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1421"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1450,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1421\/revisions\/1450"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}