The old Jamestown Bridge, connecting Conanicut Island to the mainland, is about to be history.

01:00 AM EDT on Sunday, April 9, 2006

BY ARTHUR GREGG SULZBERGER
Journal Staff Writer

The longest bridge in New England took just 18 months and $3 million to build.

On April 18, weather permitting, the first in a series of blasts will send the main span of the derelict old Jamestown Bridge -- including the distinctive lattice of steel that forms the center truss -- tumbling into Narragansett Bay.

When the rusty giant hits the water, it will mark the beginning of the end of the 14-year, $20-million effort to take the bridge down.

Sixty-six years after it was built, the narrow old Jamestown Bridge has proved to be nothing if not resilient.

FOR A LONG time there was only the ferry.

The oldest public utility in the country, running continuously between Conanicut Island and the mainland for more than 250 years, the Jamestown-Saunderstown Ferry was established in 1675 by Caleb Carr, who would later become governor and then drown during one of the ferry crossings.

A steamboat ferry service replaced the original oar- and wind-powered boats in the late 1800s, making trips between the island and Newport or North Kingstown safer, quicker and more reliable. From 1880 to 1900, Jamestown's resident population jumped from 460 to 1,500. As the island became a popular summer resort, replete with the large, upscale hotels, tourism began to supplant farming and sheep herding.

It wasn't until the public ferry service started struggling that anyone seriously considered building a bridge. The idea was raised in 1933 during a meeting of the Jamestown and Newport Ferry Company. Within months the town had hired a consultant and formed a committee to push the project.

As the country battled the worst depression in its history, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt kept the economy running with just this type of massive public works project. Newport Mayor Mortimer A. Sullivan, a vocal supporter of the bridge, made the case for Rhode Island's slice of pork: "Rhode Island should get its share of federal money, rather than let the West and the South get 70 percent, especially when rich New England taxpayers will be called on to pay most of it."

The project was blasted by opponents from Jamestown, Newport and North Kingstown's ritzy Plum Beach. A pamphlet warned of attracting "a class of picnickers, hot dog stands and other undesirable elements," and Herbert C. Pell of Newport, father of the future senator, Claiborne Pell, once cautioned, "I should hate to hear it described as Roosevelt's Bridge to Nowhere."

The bridge -- and the promise of employment of 191 men for 15 months -- had broad support, winning approval in the state House of Representatives, 96 to 1, in l934. After years of uncertainty, Roosevelt approved the project in the spring of 1938, and government financing quickly followed.

In the wake of the disastrous hurricane of 1938, which destroyed the ferryboat docks and one of the boats, landlocked island voters approved the bridge at a town meeting, 240 to 23.

By the end of the year, the project was fully financed, with a $1.4-million federal grant and $1.7 million in bonds.

The bridge "is, perhaps, the most bitterly disputed public improvement in Rhode Island history," declared The Providence Journal on April 9, 1939. "For six years the dispute has raged. The bridge has been hailed as a vital step in the state's development and denounced as a waste of money. It has been praised as a necessary link in the highway system and condemned as a 'bridge to nowhere.' And during those six years the project has been approved and rejected so many times by so many authorities that even the sponsors have lost count."

CONSTRUCTION OF the $3.1-million bridge started almost immediately.

Laborers worked without safety equipment, scurrying on beams and riveting steel hundreds of feet above the Bay, for 50 or 60 cents an hour. Skilled workers earned $1 an hour.

Edgar Cormier, a 23-year-old farm boy from the northern tip of Maine, arrived in Rhode Island looking for a job cleaning up hurricane damage. In June 1940, he joined the crew putting the finishing touches on the bridge.

"It was good work to me, by golly," he declared last week.

One day, while working on the underside of the bridge, the ropes holding his platform broke. He grabbed a steel beam and managed to pull himself to safety while the platform and his tools tumbled more than 100 feet to the sea. Some workers quit after such near misses; Cormier stayed on. "Height doesn't bother me," he said.

Others were not so lucky. William W. Rolfe and Nicholas Turturro fell to their deaths during the project. Nevertheless, the construction bested industry estimates that assumed one death for each $1 million spent on a bridge project. Scores of others sustained injuries; one man was paid $15.67 as compensation for a severed fingertip, according to Sue Maden, author of The Jamestown Bridge, 1940-1990.

The 1.3-mile bridge was completed in July 1940, just two months behind schedule and almost $120,000 under budget. It stood on 69 piers, with a 600-foot center span towering 135 feet above the Bay. It was just 25 feet wide.

"We thought the bridge was great," one resident told Maden. "Then, it was not the skimpy bridge that it looks like today. In those days it was really elegant. We thought it was a tremendous modern thing."

ON JULY 27, 1940, Merrill Smith drove through the new Jamestown Bridge toll booth in his '32 Chevy coupe. Smith, of Jamestown, had parked the car at the foot of the bridge overnight for the distinction of being the first to pay $1.60 for a round-trip ticket.

The mood was celebratory. Twenty-four young women bearing the names of Rhode Island communities held on to the "ribbon of beauty" as the daughter of the bridge commission chairman cut the ribbon. A free bridge day attracted 12,000 cars, and a $1,500 fireworks show awed spectators.

"The whole town turned out," remembers Edward Morinho, now 81. "Of course, we didn't have many people in town in those days."

Despite the high tolls needed to pay off the bond debt, more than 250,000 cars crossed the bridge in its first year, exceeding the most optimistic estimates. A one-way ticket cost 90 cents for a car, 15 cents for a pedestrian, 35 cents for a horse and 75 cents for a horse and buggy. (The toll for automobiles would gradually decrease to a quarter; the horse and buggy toll was dropped.)

THE BRIDGE changed island life.

Skunks arrived from the mainland. Then developers.

"It opened up the island for development," says Town Planner Lisa Bryer. "What bigger impact can you have to an island?"

A developer from Miami began slicing up and selling off half-acre and quarter-acre lots in the area near the bridge known as Jamestown Shores, an effort locals derisively nicknamed "the Project." Thanks to a radio advertising campaign and free toll coupons for prospective buyers to cross the bridge, the lots became popular with families from Cranston, Warwick, Providence and elsewhere looking for an inexpensive summer hideaway.

But even as development increased and the island became more attractive to commuters, the number of permanent residents grew very little, only 675 from 1930 to 1960.

With cars still ferrying across the East Passage between Jamestown and Newport, backing up traffic on summer days, some suggested a second bridge was inevitable. An engineering firm hired by the state, however, recommended against a bridge in 1955, instead endorsing a $31-million tube tunnel under the Bay.

But eventually, plans for a bridge linking Jamestown to Newport prevailed. In l969, the $61-million Newport Bridge was completed, years behind schedule and $20 million over budget.

On June 28, the day the new bridge opened, charging $2 for a one-way trip, the toll booths on the Jamestown Bridge closed. On the same day, the last bond debt was paid off and the state took ownership of the old bridge.

The bridge to nowhere had become a bridge to Newport.

The number of Jamestown's residents grew 700 from 1960 to 1970 and about 1,000 in each of the following decades.

IN THE SHADOW of its shapely neighbor, the Jamestown Bridge suddenly looked very old.

The lanes were just 11 feet wide. The steel grate at the summit -- designed to help reduce wind stress -- was notoriously slippery. Steep inclines on both sides left many drivers praying their cars would make it up and their brakes would hold on the way down. Strong Bay winds, rain or ice kept even veteran drivers on edge.

It was, quite simply, the scariest stretch of road many Rhode Islanders can remember.

"There were lots of people who wouldn't visit because of the bridge," says MaryAlice Lurgio, who works at the Jamestown Police Station.

The first fatal car accident on the bridge didn't occur until 1951. But as cars grew faster, wider and more plentiful, driving the Jamestown Bridge became an increasingly harrowing experience. Some called it "the Hail Mary" bridge.

"It was very scary and could be very dangerous," Police Chief Thomas Tighe says. "The narrowness didn't leave you any room for error."

Detective Sgt. Frank Watson remembers the occasional visits to the police stations by visitors too panicked to make the return trip over the bridge. Sometimes Watson would take the wheel as the frightened driver lay in the back seat, eyes closed, or head buried. As he approached the top, Watson would turn up the radio to drown out the sound of the grate.

The bridge was also the site of many suicides, though state and Jamestown police officials say they have no figures for the number of people who jumped over the years.

IN 1978, Wayne C. Tucker, a scuba diver hired by the state Department of Transportation, discovered serious deterioration in several piers. DOT and federal officials insisted that the bridge was safe but began expensive repairs. Providence Journal photos of the water-eroded concrete, pitted and crumbling, alarmed those who used the bridge.

Soon the school buses were heading over the bridge one at a time.

Kristen Hazlewood, of Jamestown, remembers the first time her bus waited at the start of the bridge. The buses crossed one at a time for the rest of her years at North Kingstown High. "We put two and two together and figured out why; they did not want an entire generation of Jamestown students wiped out. We thought about it every day, to and from school."

If the sorry shape of the structure hadn't made the case clear, the legendary summer traffic jams -- which made Jamestown lemonade stands among the most profitable in the state -- did. The old bridge was obsolete.

"For many years we had to drive over the bridge knowing it was unsafe," says Carol Hopkins, a fifth-generation Jamestown resident and coowner of Island Realty. "We just couldn't wait for the new one to be built."

AFTER MORE than a decade of acrimony, including arguments over the new bridge's height, width and location and plans for a major highway through the island, the Jamestown-Verrazzano Bridge opened in 1992, four years behind schedule. The bridge cost $160 million; it was $96 million over budget and more than 50 times the cost of the span it replaced.

But it was 74 feet wide, with four spacious lanes and a barrier in the middle. The grating was gone, and the sturdy concrete design, with a minimum life span of 100 years, according to DOT engineers, inspired the confidence of drivers.

The faint of heart could visit Jamestown again.

By 2000, there were 5,622 residents, 3 1/2 times the population before the original bridge. Last year, the median price of a single family home rose above $550,000, making island homes among the most expensive in the state.

The old Jamestown Bridge, as it is now known, proved sturdier than anyone expected. For the 14 years since its replacement, the bridge has stood 100 feet to the south, closed to the public except for the handful of anglers who jump the fence to drop a line in some of the best fishing waters in the state.

The DOT, meanwhile, tried to pawn the bridge off: offering Hollywood producers the opportunity to blow it up if they'd pay the demolition costs, converting it into a bike path, or giving away the bridge to anyone who would take it. As the bridge rusted and the concrete continued to deteriorate, the Coast Guard threatened to fine the state, calling the decaying giant a navigational hazard.

Projected demolition costs swelled from $12 million in 1999 to $22 million last year as the state realized it would have to take the bridge down.

In September, the DOT awarded the $19.5-million demolition contract, 80 percent of which will be paid by the federal government, to Cashman Equipment Corp. of Boston.

The steel grating and concrete decking have been removed to lighten the load for the bridge's collapse into the Bay. The DOT gave the two air beacon lights to Governor Carcieri, who made the removal of the bridge a priority, and Sen. Lincoln Chafee, who secured much of the demolition money.

Some of the concrete has already been dumped offshore, where the DOT has selected three sites for artificial reefs. The steel, still valuable after all these years, will be recycled.

For Edgar Cormier, who spent two months long ago helping to build the bridge, seeing the piecemeal teardown is difficult.

"Every time I have a chance, I go and take a look at it," says Cormier, a father of nine and a husband of 64 years who now lives in South Kingstown. "I nearly cried when I saw it the other day. It was like looking at someone in the hospital, falling apart. My poor bridge."

IN ANTICIPATION of the demolition, Maden and the Jamestown Historical Society have been gathering anecdotes.

The list is full of childhood memories of the steel grates: the children who believed that the rumble at the top was the roar of a dragon; the siblings who knew from their mother's white-knuckled clench on the passenger arm rest to keep absolutely silent.

The adults behind the wheel offer stories through different eyes: the terror of driving across in a motorcycle, running out of gas at the summit or the dreams about plummeting through the grate.

One person sent in a recording of a car going over the grate. Another sent a two-minute home video of the bridge trip. Anne Barrett declared herself the first person to drive across the bridge toll-free, while her husband, in the car ahead, was the last to pay.

"If you had never been over the bridge, these would give an impression of what the bridge was like and how important it was in people's lives," says Maden.

Many residents, though, say they're happy to see it go, their sentiments toward the old bridge captured in the last three words of Maden's 1990 book: fear and ridicule.

The book, a meticulously researched account that traces the history of the bridge from idea to eyesore, is now out of print, in high demand and selling for $50 on Amazon.com.

And somewhere in the intervening years, Maden has developed a tenderness for the bridge, which she can see from her front yard on West Bay View Drive and affectionately describes as "an erector set."

"There's something about that silly little narrow bridge," she says.

asulzber@projo.com / (401) 277-7405

How to watch

For those interested in watching the demolition of the old Jamestown Bridge, a public viewing center will be set up at the University of Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay Campus.

The first detonation, which will take down the center span of the bridge, is scheduled for April 18. It has been postponed once because of weather delays in preparing the bridge for demolition.

The Jamestown-Verrazzano Bridge will be closed from approximately 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on the day of the demolition for safety and cleanup. The demolition will take place between 11 a.m. and noon, according to the Department of Transportation.

Live footage of the demolition will also be online at the DOT's Web site -- http://www.dot.state.ri.us -- and at a special viewing center at the Jamestown Philomenian Library.

GALLERY: View more photos of the old Jamestown Bridge from a historical perspective, at:

http://projo.com