Chicago’s bridges are world-famous and locally celebrated, except perhaps by those waiting in traffic when a drawbridge is raised.
“They’re an integral part of our city,” said Margaret Frisbee, executive director of Friends of the Chicago River, which operates the McCormick Bridgehouse & Chicago River Museum downtown. “Chicago exists because the river is there, and the bridges tell the story of our city and how it’s evolved.”
This includes the engineered waterways that created connections between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River system, such as the Cal-Sag Canal. The region’s canals and associated infrastructure “continue the history of Chicago using the river system to keep itself on the map, creating this network of waterways for commerce.”
That network, along with the overlay of railroads and roads that fit into the city’s grid, has created an environment in which more bridge patents have been filed than anywhere else in the country, Frisbee said. Chicago has more drawbridges than any other city in the world except Amsterdam, according to Patrick McBriarty, a historian and author of the reference guide “Chicago River Bridges.”
The serene lakefront and playful river walk betray Chicago’s downtown port city heritage, where in the 1880s ship arrivals and departures outpaced all ports on the East and West coasts, McBriarty said.
“The bridges were opening or un-opening as many as four or five times an hour,” he said. People at street level were increasingly late. Although Chicago had become “a melting pot for new bridge design,” McBriarty said, the city’s famous movable spans were probably not very popular.
When the Cal-Sag Canal opened a few decades later, drawbridges were mostly left out of the plans, with the notable exception of the 95th Street Bridge over the Calumet River, which was famously jumped in the movie “The Blues Brothers.”
On the one hand, advances in tugs equipped with hydraulic lifts have made it possible to build wheelhouses that can be lowered to pass under fixed bridges.
The designers of the Crawford Avenue Bridge over the Cal-Sag weren’t sure, though. One of the oldest bridges along the canal, the Crawford Bridge was designed to accommodate lift towers in case future ship traffic required additional clearance, according to its listing on historicbridges.org.
That never happened, and since its construction in 1932 nearly 100 years ago, the bridge has quietly done its job connecting Robbins and Alsip via Pulaski Road.
A small metal plaque attached to the bridge’s steel beams is easy to miss. It’s the same color as the rest of the structure that carries thousands of motorists daily along its four-lane span. It indicates that the bridge was built by McClintic-Marshall, an engineering firm involved in historic bridges across the country, including building the towers and deck structure of the George Washington Bridge in New York.
By the time the Crawford Avenue Bridge was built, the company had been acquired by Bethlehem Steel, although it still retained its own corporate identity. This changed after its involvement in another, even more famous bridge later in the decade. Winning the contract to build the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco meant the end of the company.
According to the Bethlehem Steel Corporation archives maintained and published online by the Hagley Museum and Library in Delaware, “When Bethlehem Steel President Eugene Grace saw the name McClintic-Marshall on the Golden Gate Bridge instead of Bethlehem, he quickly ordered the merger of McClintic-Marshall Corporation with Bethlehem Steel Company.”
Although Bethlehem’s logo appears on the plaque affixed to the deck above the Cal-Sag, it is overshadowed by the McClintic-Marshall name. Clearly, Eugene Grace didn’t care much for Bethlehem’s bragging rights over Robbins.
The bridge continues to be called Crawford Avenue, although the street name was officially changed, at least in Chicago, to Pulaski Road just two years after its construction. Crawford was named for Peter Crawford, an early politician who helped organize Cicero Township, who lent his name to Cicero Avenue, the next major thoroughfare to the west.
Even today, the Crawford/Pulaski debate is rekindled from time to time, but Cook County officials have opted for the new name as they consider a major project along the road that encompasses the bridge span.
The Pulaski Corridor Study, a long-term process that began in 2020 and is expected to be completed in 2025, encompasses a stretch of Pulaski from 159th to 127th Streets in Markham, Midlothian, Robbins, Crestwood and Alsip.
Jennifer “Sis” Killen, superintendent of the Cook County Department of Transportation, said it was a way to “address existing roadway deficiencies while adding pedestrian amenities.”
“We are reimagining what this corridor will look like,” she said.
Part of the process is determining what to do about the Crawford Bridge, which the Illinois Department of Transportation deemed structurally deficient in 2019. The bridge was repaired in 2022, but replacing it was among the potential outcomes of the Pulaski Corridor study.
A preliminary investigation indicates that the bridge is historically significant and eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.
Historicbridges.org gives the Crawford Bridge a national rating of six out of 10, while increasing its local rating to seven as “one of the oldest surviving truss bridges on these waterways.”
“The bridge stands out from the group as being important… an example of the traditional composition of a through-girder bridge of the 1930s,” its inscription states.
Killen said the county has taken note of its historical significance.
“How can we preserve the structure and what alternatives do we have so that it is not a reconstruction of this structure, because of its historical presence and its identity?” she said.
“Our first goal is to have no impact at all. If an impact is necessary, we must minimize it as much as possible.”
Killen said the bridge is now in “good shape” thanks to the 2022 work, which gave planners “time and space to evaluate and prioritize improvements for the corridor and the bridge itself.”
“We don’t want to disrupt historical elements that are important to communities,” she said.
Most of the other bridges across the Cal-Sag were built in the 1960s and 1970s, making the Crawford Bridge a typical example of the region’s historic bridges, with strong ties to its more famous cousins on both American coasts.
It may not be as famous as Chicago’s drawbridges, but it has its own significance in the history of the area.
“One of the great things about Chicago is its amazing, historic bridges,” said Frisbee of the McCormick Bridgehouse Museum. “They’re all unique, they’re all really amazing.”
Landmarks is Paul Eisenberg’s column exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. You can contact him at peisenberg@tribpub.com.
