December 10, 1910
The Hawthorne Bridge in Portland, Oregon, was officially opened to traffic. This bridge had been designed by Waddell & Harrington and, as part of the inaugural festivities, C.K. Allen from that engineering firm formally recommended acceptance of the new structure to the city. Portland Mayor Joseph Simon responded by declaring, “Let it open!”
This structure, which is specifically a truss bridge with a vertical lift, crosses the Willamette River and links Hawthorne Boulevard with Madison Street in Portland. (Both the bridge and Hawthorne Boulevard owe their shared name to Dr. J.C. Hawthorne, a prominent 19th century local resident and physician.) The Hawthorne Bridge was built to replace the Madison Bridge. The Madison Bridge, which was the second bridge there to bear that name, had been closed to traffic after less than a decade of service due to its poor condition.
The Hawthorne Bridge is now the oldest vertical-lift bridge still in operation in the United States. In addition, the structure is Portland’s oldest highway bridge and one of the most heavily used in the city. The Hawthorne Bridge is also the busiest bicycle and transit bridge in all of Oregon, with a daily average of more than 8,000 bicyclists and 800 TriMet buses traveling over the structure. The bridge is likewise heavily used on a regular basis by pedestrians. In 2012, the Hawthorne was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
Photo Credit: Steve Morgan (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Steve_Morgan) – licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en
For more information on the Hawthorne Bridge, please check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne_Bridge and https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/master/pnp/habshaer/or/or0200/or0290/data/or0290data.pdf
Transportation History 
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