![]() Vertical Lift Bridge in operation at Eagle Street. The cables which carry the counter-weights pass over giant pulley wheels, called “sheaves”, at each end of the lift span. A vertical lift span is easily recognizable by the high skeleton towers, one at each end of the span. A vertical lift bridge operates in much the same fashion as does an ordinary window sash, which moves up and down in vertical guides and is hung from sash-cords that go over a pulley at the top, with a counter-weight at the other end. This type is the most popular today, for ease and rapidity of operation and for navigation clearance. The first bridge as we enter the Cuyahoga River is a modern vertical lift bridge. Let us journey up the Cuyahoga River from the channel entrance at Lake Erie and explore the history and development of the movable bridges in Cleveland’s original “harbor”. Clevelanders can take pride in this aspect of their city that has long gone unappreciated. One can see viaducts, stone-masonry arches, concrete arches, cantilever spans, and girder spans, swing bridges, vertical lift bridges, bascule bridges, jackknife bridges and Scherzer Rolling Lift Bridges. Twenty of these are over the navigable portion of the river - that is, from the mouth to the turning basin. ![]() From the mouth of the Cuyahoga River to Akron there are eighty-four bridges - over three and a half per mile. All needed bridges to take them across the valley and the river to terminals, and each had a design peculiar to the location. One reason is that one time seven different railroads entered Cleveland. He who travels up the Cuyahoga River from its mouth to the turning basin will probably see a greater variety of types of movable bridges than can be seen in any other place in the world. But they perform functions vital to Cleveland industries. In Cleveland these “ugly ducklings” among bridges are treated with disgust when they are closed to traffic to allow a ship to pass. Movable bridges, generally placed in this same category, are, however, prominent structures indeed even more so than the ordinary highway bridges. Railroads, rapid transit right-of-way and power pole are generally considered to be necessary evils, so utilitarian are they, that no one gives a thought to making them beautiful.
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