Tag: transportation

Rebuilding bridges

On April 28, 2013

In the nineteenth century, the American South’s carriage roads used to cross the region’s many streams and rivers by means of wooden truss bridges. Very few of these bridges have survived into the twenty-first century, having falling prey to fire, floods, storms, modernization—and in some cases, the Union Army. A few bridges have survived, tucked away in isolated, underpopulated areas. Perhaps because of their rarity, covered bridges have acquired romantic mythos, even though they were originally built for economic development, not romance.1 Websites like this one catalog the surviving covered bridges in the region.

It came as a surprise when I realized that my map of Lee County, Alabama indicated that there was a covered bridge not far from where I live. According to the map, the Salem-Shotwell Bridge was just off of US-280, the highway that runs from Opelika, AL to Columbus, GA. I followed the map out to the indicated location one Saturday afternoon. Before I quite got to the bridge, a sign planted in the middle of the road claimed: “Bridge Closed Ahead.”

That was an understatement. As I got closer, I discovered that the bridge had vanished completely.

The forlorn original foundation of the Salem-Shotwell Bridge.

My map was more than a half-decade out of date. Come to find out, the bridge had broken in 2005, when a tree smashed into it during one of the fearsome thunderstorms that occur from time to time in the Alabama Piedmont.

The Salem-Shotwell Bridge’s destruction was an unfortunate loss, but it was not a complete waste. Enough of the original timbers and roofing had survived undamaged for the bridge to be reconstructed, with a shorter span, over a creek in Municipal Park in Opelika.

The reconstructed Salem-Shotwell Bridge at its new location in Opelika Municipal Park.

Side view of the reconstructed Salem-Shotwell Bridge.

Interior of the Salem-Shotwell Bridge.

Detail of the Town Truss of Salem-Shotwell Bridge.

Some of the leftover parts were used for the sign that identifies the bridge:

Wasting well: the bridge sign, made from unused parts of the original bridge.

The underside of the bridge holds a secret: steel I-beams, which support the weight of the reconstructed bridge. The original wooden truss (known as a Town Truss, after its inventor) is now just for show.

I-beams or no I-beams, I’m glad that the Salem-Shotwell Bridge was reconstructed. Its reconstruction is an example of what Kevin Lynch would call wasting well. Even in its present state, the bridge teaches anybody who sees it a little about the past.

A good book about southern covered bridges and their mythos is John S. Lupold and Thomas L. French, Bridging Deep South Rivers: The Life and Legend of Horace King (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2004). [↩]

Wasting Well on the High Line

By Willy

On March 21, 2013

In Archeology and monuments, USA

New York City’s High Line is the most unusual park I have seen. The park occupies an abandoned rail bed in lower Manhattan. Reuse of redundant industrial spaces—what Kevin Lynch called “wasting well”—is not uncommon in cities in the deindustrializing West. What is unusual is that the park’s rail line is elevated above street level. It was originally built in the 1930s to remove dangerous freight trains from Manhattan’s crowded streets. Traffic on the line declined during the 1960s, and the last train ran on it in 1980. During its decades of disuse and abandonment, the rail bed grew over with wild vegetation. Threatened with demolition, the line was saved by a group known as Friends of the High Line, which successfully lobbied to have the abandoned structure converted into a park. The first phase of the High Line Park opened in 2009.

The High Line’s conversion into a park did not obscure the place’s past lives as a functioning rail line or a derelict structure. As far as possible, the redevelopers left the original rails in place, or reinstalled them. In some places, the rails run alongside the park’s paved pathway. Elsewhere, the rails have been integrated directly into the pavement.

View of High Line Park.

Rails integrated into the pavement.

The park’s landscaping emphasizes the post-industrial nature of the site. Trees grow between the ties of the abandoned tracks.

Trees growing through the rails.

The current southern end of the High Line ends abruptly where the remainder of the original line was chopped off to make room for new development. The park’s developers left the cut open, allowing a glimpse of the heavy steel structure that was strong enough to hold freight trains above the street.

The southern terminus of the High Line.

The substructure of the High Line.

Since the early period of the republic, Americans have had a reputation for always wanting to throw away the old in favor of the new. This reputation is not undeserved. Americans built much of their industrial infrastructure cheaply, in the belief that something new and better would have come along by the time their infrastructure wore out. In the mid-nineteenth century, when the British were making railway viaducts out of stone so they would last forever, the Americans were making theirs out of wood, which was cheap but not durable. The ruins of abandoned rail lines can be seen all over the country, especially in places such as the mountain West where they have not been replaced by new development.1

In the latter half of the twentieth century, some Americans finally started to realize that the Old, as well as the New, has use and value. The High Line Park is one example of the Old being put to a creative and interesting New use.

Arnold Pacey contrasts the nineteenth-century British interest in monumentality and permanence with the contemporary American obsession with newness in The Maze of Ingenuity: Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), 209-15. [↩]

The 1970s are gone forever

By Willy

On February 27, 2013

In Aviation, Indian tech

Engine nacelle of an IndiGo A320, in flight over Assam.

Air travel is an up-and-coming transportation sector in twenty-first century India. Although the majority of the Indian population has never flown on a plane before (trains and buses are still the movers of the masses), the growth of airlines has provided greatly expanded options for the Indian jet-set. In recent years, legacy carriers such as Indian Airlines have faced competition from newer companies such as Jet Airways and SpiceJet. The most successful of the new carriers is IndiGo, a Gurgaon-based regional airline with connections to twenty-eight Indian cities and five international destinations. Last year, IndiGo became the largest airline in India by market share, only six years after starting operations.1

I first got to fly on IndiGo last summer, when I took its daily flight from Jaipur to Guwahati and back (with a stopover in Kolkata). On the flight, my attention was inevitably drawn toward the flight attendants, who were all pretty young women wearing fashionable uniforms. And it’s wasn’t a fluke that they were all attractive. The in-flight magazine carried a full-page recruiting ad with some very specific requirements. “We are looking for bright, ambitious young girls to join our award-winning cabin crew,” the ad copy began. Requirements included:

Age: 18-27 years
Minimum height: 155 cm, “with weight in proportion to height”
“Well-groomed with a clear complexion”

Applicants were requested to send their resumes, along with full-length and passport photos (mugshots) to crew@indigo.in.2

Wow, this is remarkable, I thought. I’ve traveled back in time, and it’s the 1970s again.

It was in the 1970s in the United States that female flight attendants were the most blatantly exploited for their femininity and sex appeal. Although airline polices had long set requirements for age, weight, and marital status (no married women need apply), several factors in the 1970s—including increased industry competition, loosening sexual attitudes, and general bad taste—led to super-sexy flight attendant uniforms and shockingly explicit airline advertisements. This was especially the case with second-tier airlines that were competing with established carriers. The most infamous airline ad from the period, issued by National Airlines, featured a pretty young flight attendant, with the caption: “Hi, I’m Cheryl – Fly Me.”3

I should add that it was the 1970s that also saw a backlash against objectification by the flight attendants themselves. They ultimately succeeded in their demands that airlines drop discriminatory hiring practices, phase out the revealing uniforms, and stop using the term “stewardess” in favor of the gender-neutral “flight attendant.”4

Meanwhile, in India in 2012, I soon realized that the present wasn’t as similar to the American 1970s as I had thought. IndiGo was not hiring women only for their femininity; the airline was also hiring them for their skills. I realized this when my plane stopped over in Kolkata on the return trip to Jaipur. As the plane was sitting on the tarmac, the cockpit crew swapped out. One of the new pilots was a woman.

“IndiGo dethrones Jet Airways as India’s No. 1 airline,” Hindustan Times, August 17, 2012, http://www.hindustantimes.com/News-Feed/SectorsAviation/IndiGo-dethrones-Jet-Airways-as-India-s-No-1-airline/Article1-915217.aspx. [↩]
IndiGo has a somewhat different recruiting ad on its website here. [↩]
Kathleen M. Barry, Femininity in Flight: A History of Flight Attendants (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 176-84, 189-90. [↩]
Ibid., 8. [↩]

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Technology, History, and Place

Tag: transportation (Page 6 of 6)

Rebuilding bridges

Wasting Well on the High Line

The 1970s are gone forever

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