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Showing posts with label Wells Street Bridge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Wells Street Bridge. Show all posts
Saturday, was the first bridge lift of the season. It's one of Chicago's great rituals, the great bascule bridges over the Chicago river rising up like awakened giants to the sound of unseen motors revving and giant gears straining, and of the bells . . .
Of the bells, bells, bells, Of the bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells -
Poe would have had a field day on a morning like this, standing on the side of the river, composing another stanza to his famous poem as the infernal, relentless clanging bore a hole into his cranium.
click images for larger view
There used to be a guy from CDOT, a short and corpulent Napoleon of the bridge lifts, who would break up the monotony by screaming insults at pedestrians who weren't clearing the walkways fast enough for him. I haven't seen him for a while. This morning, the only relief from the frenetic ding-ding-ding came from the honking of a pair of displeased geese.
The inaugural armada passing through the spans today was, truth to tell, rather pathetic in number, but it was upstaged by a spectacular centerpiece, a couple of tugs guiding down the river a giant barge containing the replacement northern span for the Wells Street Bridge, next to which it will remain docked until April 26th, when work crews will begin disconnecting the old current span, and floating it out the way. Then the barge with the new segment will be moved into place, and the workers will begin connecting it in place, with the job scheduled to finish by May 6th.
It's around 8:00 p.m. Sunday. We are still eight hours from the scheduled resumption of Brown and Purple Line service across the Wells Street bridge, just in time for the morning rush.
Yet an eerie silence has descended at Wells and Wacker. Save for a solitary workman, there was no sign or sound of activity on a site that has been buzzing with construction for the last nine days.
Is everything already in place? I guess we'll find out tomorrow morning around 4:00 a.m., when the first train is supposed to cross a bridge that is now halfway towards its reconstruction, with another 9-day shutdown coming up later in April to finish the job by replacing the northern leaf.
Already, however, the end of the first phase has been commemorated by the ceremonial draping of a large sized pair of men's pants on the Wacker Drive balustrade . . .
To end, here are a few great aerial shots of the construction from our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson.
It was a slightly surreal sight. This may be the only time you get to see the Wells Street Bridge running, not over the river, but parallel to it.
It's all part of a nine-day shutdown of the CTA service over the bridge, whose main span is being completely replaced in two 9-day stretches, between now and March 10 for the south leaf, and again in late April for north. Here's how it looked before the south leaf was taken out, courtesy of this photograph from our indefatigable correspondent Bob Johnson . . .
photograph: Bob Johnson
The bridge has been closed to vehicular traffic since last November, a project that's expected to last a year.
“In nine days,” said Mayor Rahm Emanuel at a Sunday press conference at the site, “we're going to replace a bridge that was
here for the last 90 years. Warren Harding was President then, and if I
can say, not that great a President . . .”
According to the Historic Bridges website, the Wells Street Bridge, whose main span is 268 feet long, was dedicated on February 11, 1922. Big Bill Thompson was mayor then, and if I can say, not that great a mayor, but for being a buffoon and a boodler and an enabler of Al Capone, he sure built a lot of important stuff.
CDOT Commissioner Gabe Klein noted that the bridge was last rehabbed in the mid-1950's:
Construction crews
behind me will replace the trusses and all the steel framing for the
lower level roadway and the upper level railway. Also the guts of it,
the mechanical and electric components will also be replaced. This is a
very historic bridge and those elements - the railings, the bridge
houses, the major structural components - will be replaced but will
retain the 1920's look of this bridge.
We have crews working around the clock, 24
hours on 12 hour shifts on an accelerated construction schedule that's
designed to keep CTA service interruptions at a minimum and in fact last
night, if you were out here and saw, they actually removed the leaf that
they're working on and they're now prepping it to put that new leaf in
that's out there on a barge.
This will actually be the first time that the city has replaced large
sections of an active bridge that also carries CTA trains.
When
this project is completed at the end of November, we will have extended
the life of this critical piece of infrastructure by another 75 years or
more.
“This is an incredible feat,” said Klein. “It's really like
performing open heart surgery on a living patient.” Although trains were still running up to 10:00 p.m. last Friday, the construction crews, as Klein indicated, got the old leaf removed by the end of Saturday.
Forrest Claypool, Gabe Klein, Rahm Emanuel
The project is estimated to cost over $41,000,000. Between Emanuel, Klein and CTA head Forrest Claypool, also at Sunday's media event, it was mentioned at least three times that the way this is being managed is saving $500,000. “In the past,” explained Rahm, “CDOT would have done the bridge; years later the CTA would have done the tracks.” While Klein and Claypool were both too polite to correct their boss, I get the impression that the mayor may have been winging it here. If the CTA didn't immediately put their tracks on the rebuilt bridge, how would their trains get across all those ‘years later’?
Tower 18, Lake and Wells
Claypool offered up the actual source of savings. “The CTA will be
using this opportunity,” he explained, “. . . to do track work here, along
the Hubbard curve, as well at Tower 18, at Lake and Wells, where 5 out
of every 8 trains in the system travel through each day, so it's a
critical juncture for us and is an opportunity to modernize and repair
it during this bridge reconstruction . That will also save the
taxpayers half a million dollars by doing the projects at the same time.”
It's also makes for a kind of big mess, especially this weekend and next, when not only the Brown and Purple lines that use Wells Street, but all the other lines - Green, Pink and Orange - using the Loop L will encounter significant obstructions. Shuttle buses will be in place for Monday's commute. There are all kinds of interesting variations. Some Brown Line trains will run in the Red Line subway.
Some trains will terminate at Merchandise Mart. Some trains will
terminate at Chicago. Some trains go nowhere at all - they're just messing with you. Check out the official CTA bridge-down website and place your bets.
“I'm not minimizing it,” said the Mayor. “It is going to be an inconvenience . You can't spin your way out of that.” He also said it wouldn't stop him from his usual habit from using the CTA to commute to work a couple times a week.
“This
is just one project,” said Claypool, “amid four billion dollars of initiatives that the
CTA under Mayor Emanuel's administration in the next few years to reconstruct the system and modernize it. That includes everything from a new rail fleet to a new bus fleet to eliminating 70% of the slow zones on the system by 2015, which will provide relief to 85% of our
riders.”
“We are in the process of
now completing 20 million dollars of improvements on the Green Line,
repairs and removal of slow zones in anticipation and preparation for
the complete rebuilding of the Red Line south beginning in May. We
will be literally building a brand new railroad from 95th street to 22nd
street, cutting 20 minutes off the daily commute of south side
customers and enhancing service throughout the Red Line and throughout
the system.”
Now if we can just get him to do something about all those forward-facing seats. I'd feel a lot better about my time on the ‘L’ if I wasn't forced to spend it staring into someone's crotch.
Other current CTA projects include rebuilding Clark and Division, starting construction on a new Green Line stop near McCormick Place designed by Carol Ross Barney, and finishing the plans to replace the current Randolph and Wabash, and Madison and Wabash stops with a single ‘superstation’ at Washington.
For right now, back at Wells Street, it may be something of a mess, but it sure makes for great urban theater.
UPDATE: Moonday, March 4th, P.M. The new south leaf has been put into position . . .
