Lou’s View – June 18, 2015

The Overhead Bridge

by Lou Bernard

You hear a lot about kids today—They’re all connected to their cell phones, never looking up to see what goes on around them. Constantly talking with their thumbs, never looking at the real world, and who needs that? Even when they’re driving, for crying out loud, and why would you ever do that? WHY WOULD YOU EVER?!? The other day a girl almost backed over me while she was texting, and I was nearly hit by her “Watch Out For Bikes” bumper sticker, and WHY? FOR THE LOVE OF …

Okay. Whew. Sorry about that. Anyway, you do hear a lot about kids these days, and how they pay no attention to anything. This is not really such a new thing….Back about a century ago, kids apparently couldn’t be trusted to notice and avoid an oncoming train.

The old high school was built in 1914. You might know it as East Campus, but it’s the old high school. The railroad tracks around that section of town had been there for around half a century already. Now, clearly, when you have trains running through all the time, the smartest thing to do is let kids run past at random. It was 1914; safety hadn’t been invented yet. And nobody drove their kids to school in those days; they all walked. So, with the addition of a school, what had been a somewhat deserted area with railroad tracks became a death trap for teenagers.

The solution was the overhead railroad bridge.

Discussion began almost immediately on the idea of building a big, metal bridge along Fourth Street, to reach up and over the tracks. This was thought to be the solution to convey kids across safely. For a city project, it actually happened with remarkable speed—They were signing a contract with the construction firm by November of 1915, as opposed to, say, a century later, which is about the speed of most municipal projects. Mayor George Kreamer, who was serving at the time, apparently pushed it through pretty quickly. Kreamer was also the guy who installed streetlights on Main Street—Apparently George Kreamer had a thing for doing city construction high in the air.

Civil engineers were making surveys for the bridge in February of 1916, preparing to build. The thing was constructed by the end of the year, finally getting children off of the railroad tracks and fifty feet into the air, where they belonged.

Kids being kids, there were some issues. Rival bunches of kids staked out the bridge as their own territory, getting into the occasional fight over it. Bullies would threaten to hang smaller kids over the edge. Parents began to warn their kids to not use the bridge, apparently preferring to take their chances with the oncoming trains.

The overhead bridge appears on the 1925 Sanborn map at the Ross Library, pictured as running over the tracks along Fourth Street. According to the map, the overhead bridge was three inches long and constructed entirely of dotted lines. Actually, it was a few hundred feet, and iron.

Technically, the bridge was property of the railroad, but they had a sort of lopsided contract with the city of Lock Haven. In September of 1955, when the bridge needed new flooring, the Pennsylvania Railroad Company whipped out a forty-year-old contract that required the city to pay for the repairs to the bridge. Mayor Charles Herr, who was just reaching the end of his term, probably was not grateful to George Kreamer for agreeing to that deal, and resigned from office due to health reasons at the end of the month, basically dumping the whole thing on interim Mayor Harry Swope.

The city was also on the hook in July of 1969, when further repairs were needed. The bridge was shut down for a portion of the summer, which made a certain amount of sense, as school was out and it was not used as much, aside from the occasional prank. The newspaper, at the time, specified that the repairs were being done and railings were being installed, apparently in response to the recent invention of gravity.

Sadly, the bridge is no longer there. But a lot of people remember it. I’m guessing the ones who almost fell off or were thrown off probably remember it best.