Over The Tracks But Out Of Time

Only Traces of the Recently Dismantled Pedestrian Bridge Remain — For Now

Heading off into the wild grey yonder, this once-active, pedestrian park path now leads to, at the very least, a dead-end, at the very most a panorama of the bay. An eager set of newer steps trots down with its tail wagging to meet the overpass, only to find the bridge has left for good. A plastic orange and white barricade — the rent-a-cop of the barricade world — does all it can to keep park users from strolling over the brand new fence, through the barbed-wire tangle of blackberries, and off the cliff into a moving railroad coal car.

Many remnants I highlight in my blog are the historical fingerprints of greater things that disappeared long ago. However, in this post are some details from a younger Bellingham WA feature, which departed quite recently.

Up until 2019, at Boulevard Park, there was a weathered, pedestrian trestle overpass and stair tower that connected pedestrians on the bluff above with the park below. Its existence dates back to the impassioned birth of the park itself during the 1970s. After citizens campaigned for the land in the vicinity to be developed as a park for all, the city, reluctant at first, eventually succumbed to public pressure and purchased the privately-owned properties in a piece-meal fashion. The redevelopment of the industrial wasteland of charred mill-pilings and landfill rubble soon followed, creating by June of 1980 the people’s playground that we know today. What a community asset the park has been. Attracting a diverse spread of people of all ages, the amenities of Boulevard Park are plenty. With paths, picnic tables, a sandy beach, grass, views, a boardwalk, a playground, and even shady trees to string a hammock between, it is truly a park befitting a city on the bay. The unique overpass and stairs made it all the more appealing.

I remember this railroad overpass well. Using it often on my bike rides and walks around town over the thirty-some years I have lived here, it was a nice short-cut to the park paths below, and certainly, one of those unusual city features that became synonymous with Bellingham. Thickly designed in the industrial style common in the dusk of 1970s and the dawn of the 1980s, the boxy, square-tube of the span and stair tower beyond was constructed with heavy, exposed, wooden beams spaced far apart. While the stair tower had been built in place, the bridge overpass was sensibly built off-site and hauled to the park in one piece. Spanning an active rail line, I can imagine this installation went off carefully during a brief recess between traveling trains, and a crane must have been employed to achieve this quickly.

Jeff Jewell, the Research Technician at the Whatcom Museum Photo Archives, has known the overpass since its birth. He said that not only were the spaces between the wall beams large enough for a child to slip through, but there was the possibility of others to conduct mischievous physics experiments by dropping objects onto moving trains. With this in mind, it is of no surprise that the entire structure was wrapped in a grid of heavy-gauge fencing. This gave the structure the feeling of walking into a sunny, tunnel-like birdcage in an old aviary. Despite the bridge span and stair tower having a seagull’s view of the water, the park, and the trains running directly beneath, this protective steel grid was like viewing the world through the veil of the cumbersome, transparent graph paper of giants. Designed with feet in mind but not eyes, I suppose the overpass was never really intended to be an observation tower.

Being only one of two overhead pedestrian railroad overpasses in town — the other being the much older Taylor Dock ramp in Fairhaven —this public construction looming over the railroad tracks was indeed a rarity. Regardless of this fact, this deceivingly durable-looking bridge was still understandably doomed.

Without ramps or an elevator, not only was the overpass inaccessible to those in wheel-chairs, according to the WWU Environmental Impact Assessment in the fall of 2018 and public notice signage posted around Boulevard Park, due to structural damage — specifically a rotten beam — and concerns about the likely future maintenance costs of the compromised 40-year-old structure, it was removed by the city in the summer of 2019. Whether it was by hand, crane, or both, the removal required the utilities running through the structure to be relocated instead under Bayview Drive, at the other end of the park. All those years, the bridge had a dual purpose — as pedestrian access and as a conduit for utilities.

How amazing it is the speed at which a mostly-sturdy, heavy-beamed structure spanning a busy set of railroad tracks can be dismantled. I never got a chance to witness even the briefest moment of its careful deconstruction. As if the demolition crew waved a magic wand, the bridge vanished, it seemed overnight. At the time of this writing, I have not found any city plans to replace the bridge and stairs.

Regardless of this necessary loss, hard evidence of the structure’s former existence is still there above and below. Where the upper section was connected, there are two remnants. The first remnant, in the photo above, is a blacktop footpath ending abruptly. This is where the bridge’s cage once took flight and landed you safely in the park below. The second detail is the concrete bridge abutment still embedded in the hillside beyond a new wood fence.

Looking like a bench for elves in a theater of humans, the retired bridge abutment looks out over the bay. Reminiscing its career as a once invisible section of supportive concrete, it someday may be laid to rest by a thicket of blackberry vines before being later exhumed by the gaping jaws of excavators.

In the park below is the third remnant — the concrete base pad of the heavy staircase tower. Once leading park-goers from the neighborhoods above to green grass, frisbees, and salty-air, it now lies forgotten and feeling light as a feather.

At the base of it all: I remember exiting the tower of the overpass on the left side, where the concrete is lighter in color. I have seen in other photos that there was a locked utility room under the stairs on the right-side square. What used to be the towering stair structure above is today only refreshing sea-breezes in the company of quiet condominiums.

The Bellingham Parks Department has been upgrading Boulevard Park for years now, making sensible improvements to its paths and infrastructure as it sews together a better park for the future. According to the plan, there are more upgrades to Boulevard Park to come, most dramatically the toxic-soil mitigation on and near the bluff where an extremely pollutive coal gasification plant once stood. I do not entertain a “soil remediation” project of light-duty landscaping with wheelbarrows and shovels. Instead, I paint a more dramatic picture of heavy, beeping equipment like excavators and dump trucks. As the machines crawl through the work of removing structures like the enormous tank base, “capping” the site to arrest the leaching, hazardous soil, and other mysterious tasks of scientific containment and monitoring, what we see today of these three remnants may not survive.

I looked into the time frame of just when this clean-up should come to pass. Despite the limitations of COVID19, apparently, life goes on. The enormous ballbearing of multi-agency pinball still seems to be pinging along the virtual corridors of corporate and government offices. The Washington State Department of Ecology site was helpful about what comes next and when. The “response to comments” and the finalization of the Cleanup Action Plan happened in August 2020. Completed design and permitting is planned for 2022, and clean up is slated to begin in 2023. Still, like an electrical “brown-out” that limits the normal activity of an entire city, I can’t help but wonder if the world-wide virus still might slow this project down along the way. Pandemic or not, environmental cleanup projects like these don’t happen quickly. They proceed like one would expect a methodical bureaucratic procedure to advance. If this were anything like brewing coffee, it wouldn’t be pouring hot water over instant grounds. Rather, it will progress more like the painstakingly ritualized process of an overnight, cold-brewed toddy one enjoys twelve to twenty-four hours later.

In the meantime, things are rather quiet. The dead-end paved path still leads one like an arrow missing its point to the question mark of an absent overpass, its plastic folding barricade in recent months dutifully marching on like an inchworm to other, more pressing assignments. The concrete stair-tower pad in the park below remains in place but now serving in a lighter-role. With the dying restroom building nearby crippled and locked with a broken sewer, the pad now serves as a temporary base of operations for a family of portable toilets and a wash-station for the park’s north end. This is like an employee, after forty years of “paying their dues,” being assigned to lighter duties as they glide toward retirement. As autumn grows colder, I wonder if this arrangement will disappear over the winter and return in the spring.

I am glad I got to photograph and share these three details of this deceased, forty-year-old local feature before they are permanently erased. But if the excavators don’t come any time soon, these remnants may remain for a while longer, except, of course, for the bridge abutment, that unremarkable chunk of faceless concrete on the hill that acted as the threshold in a different relationship with our landscape. Now that the game of shade is over, the crowd of blackberry brambles on the sidelines is any year now, ready to victoriously storm the field and completely bury this defenseless gray remnant for the remainder of its days.