Beautiful Bridges

Beauty prizes for the handsomest U.S. bridges built last year were distributed last week by the American Institute of Steel Construction, Inc. The prize for the loveliest bridge costing over $1,000,000 went to the Susquehanna River Bridge (see cut) between Havre de Grace and Perryville, Md. Winners in this class have often been spiderwebby suspension bridges, but no large suspension bridges were completed in the U.S. in 1940. In fact the only suspension bridge to win a prize was in the smallest class (under $250,000), the Klamath River Bridge at Orleans, in Humboldt County, Calif. Other winners this year: the Dunnings Creek Bridge ($250,000 to $1,000,000) on the Pennsylvania Turnpike; and the Oceanic Bridge (drawbridge) over New Jersey's Navesink River.

Experts deny that there is a trend away from suspension bridges, though one such U.S. bridge (Washington's Tacoma Narrows Bridge) buckled in a high wind last November, and last year's prizewinner (the feathery Bronx-Whitestone Bridge) has recently been equipped with diagonal stays to check its oscillations. The Susquehanna River Bridge, which won the big bridge prize this year, is a type of bridge using the relatively new Wichert Truss which needs less steel and spreads to take up extra stress when its piers settle in soft river bottoms. It was built at a cost of $4,085,000 by Baltimore's J. E. Greiner Co., winners of an honorable mention last year. Its designer, Greiner Co.'s young (35) Edward Russell Allen, saw the bridge completed last September, died four months later in an auto accident nearby.

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