Monday, June 29, 2009

Washington Street Bridge

Built: 1930
Edward Bennet, architect
Thomas Pihlfeldt, engineer
Alexander VonBabo, engineer

Bridge house originally clad with copper sheet metal, but there looks to be alot of odd repairs.

This is looking east towards the Loop across the Chicago River. You can see the edge of the Civic Opera on the right. I had this idea to create drawings of every bridge around the Loop and to compile them into a booklet with a little history for each one. Would tourists buy that sort of thing? Could I sell them downtown without getting arrested? Probably not.

Drawing every bridge seemed a lot more achievable before I found that this one took me two weeks of lunch breaks.

Wednesday we leave for another whirlwind trip to Ohio. Felix can see the grandparents and we can forget about work for a while. I hope. Turns out the union rejected the City's offer for furloughs instead of layoffs. As of July 15th 1,500 city workers will be gone. It seems like random luck that I'm not included. This time.