Yesterday, we asked you to guess a vintage bridge location. Superguesser walker-d basically got this: You're looking at the previous version of the West Seattle Bridge. Specifically, the corner is 11th Ave SW and SW Spokane St on Harbor Island.
Images: Seattle Municipal Archives, Google Maps Before periodic viaduct closures backed up drivers headed into West Seattle, drawbridges in a heavily-trafficked marine industrial area did the trick just fine!
While the city started making a plan to replace the bridges in the '60s, and voters opted to replace the bridge in a 1968 election, the project was tabled due to a bribery scandal. In the mid-70s a federal highway administrator said it would take a boat literally hitting the bridge for the thing to be replaced — a thing that actually happened in 1978. West Seattle finally got its current bridge, technically the Jeanette Williams Memorial Bridge, in 1984, with a lower bridge still running parallel on Spokane.
· When the Ship Hit the Span [Cascadia Courier]
· All Cornerspotter coverage [CS]
Written by Sarah Anne Lloyd