7 tales from the bridges of Marion County
Bridges get heralded for their role metaphorically in promoting healing and human understanding and connectedness and all that.
But as actual objects, as public spaces, bridges often get overlooked (unless they’re old, folksy and covered). This despite their considerable drama. The architecture of bridges always is striking, typically involving, in a supporting role, high, curved arches, and up top there’s all that incredible horizontalness.
The views from bridges tend to be grand, especially when overlooking water. Look left or right from the Kessler Boulevard bridge over the White River. The river is wide there as it heads from Broad Ripple into Rocky Ripple. And just south of the bridge there is, sure enough, an actual ripple. The sun sometimes dances on the ripple, and then the whole scene looks as good as Canada.
And down low, bridges’ secluded undersides are nearly always freaky in their seamy semi-privacy, with their campfire remnants, their empty bottles of cheap gin and their often hopeless (but interesting) graffiti. “Nobody cares dude,” it says in foot-tall letters beneath a railroad bridge on the city’s Eastside.
Marion County has 939 bridges. Star photographer Michelle Pemberton and I recently drove around looking for ones to write about and photograph. Here are seven with interesting stories, some unhappy.
THAT WEIRD, CAGED-IN FOOT BRIDGE ACROSS I-65
In the 1960s construction began on I-65, which was great for truckers but which cut a wide swath through a once tight-knit Westside neighborhood, dividing the neighborhood. Pedestrians can’t cross a six-lane interstate any easier than they can cross a river.
“There must have been some complaining from people with relatives on the other side,” said Larry Moore, a retired state office worker who grew up in the neighborhood.
Such complaints, Moore speculates, are what led to the foot bridge between 34th Street and 35th Street, about a quarter mile west of Clifton Avenue.
The little bridge, which went up in 1969, is pretty charmless. It’s entirely enclosed with chain-link fencing. It’s extremely loud, with cars and trucks hurtling 20 feet below.
The neighborhood, with its many abandoned houses, is no longer thriving, and the bridge does not get much traffic, neighbors say. But if the goal of the bridge was to reconnect a torn-in-two neighborhood, well, it was a lovely goal.
AN AQUEDUCT, JUST LIKE THE ROMANS HAD
One of Indianapolis’ most ingenious bridges is, unfortunately, posted with “no trespassing” signs and so is difficult for the law abider to fully appreciate. It can be glimpsed from the banks of Fall Creek above 16th Street or from the Fall Creek levy across from the Pick-A-Part junkyard at 16th and Aqueduct streets.
It’s an actual aqueduct. An acqueduct is a bridge but not for people — for water. Indianapolis’ aqueduct is part of the Central Canal. The bridge carries the canal’s tranquil water some 40 feet above the untamed Fall Creek toward the city’s water purification plant.
A ROOF OVER THEIR HEADS; ‘MAY CAUSE DIZZINESS’
Homeless people are drawn to bridges for the obvious reason that bridges can serve as roofs. At the railroad bridge over Davidson Street Michelle and I found signs of a camp: water bottles, a copy of the new testament, typed instructions for what to expect from the sedative hydroxyzine (”may cause dizziness”) and the anti-seizure medicine gabapentin (“may cause dizziness/may cause blurred vision”).
The underside of the Washington Street Bridge over the White River has long been a magnet for the homeless, and over the years its occupants recorded their stories and thoughts on the bridge: “Patrick lived here/came from Nashville Nov.-Dec. 2013” and “Peace be with you” and “Respect Lael.” The latter was a reference to a man who in the late 20th century was for reasons unknown the subject of a widespread and profane graffiti campaign throughout Indianapolis. As an undergrad at the Herron School of Art and Design, a teen-aged Michelle ventured into abandoned buildings to photograph numerous anti-Lael screeds for a class project.
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WHILE OTHERS DIALED 911, HE JUMPED TO THE RESCUE
It used to be part of Washington Street, the mighty National Road, but is now a pedestrian bridge in what has become the city’s most touristy place. The old Washington Street bridge, at a wide bend in the White River, connects the NCAA’s Hall of Champions with the Indianapolis Zoo and is abutted by the well-manicured White River State Park with its lawns and curvy sidewalks. Michelle and I were nearly run over by a wedding party on bicycles.
On Feb. 13, 2013, this happened: A woman fell over the bridge’s railing and into the icy river. She apparently lost her balance while photographing ducks. It was a long fall, about 40 feet.
She thrashed around in the water. “Help,” she said.
Several bystanders dialed 911, “but no one looked like they were going in,” Keith Smedema, a 53-year-old retired air traffic controller, told an Indianapolis Star reporter later. “I realized it was me or nobody. So I thought, ‘I guess it's me then.’”
Smedema jumped in feet first and swam toward the woman. The two stood together on a sandbar and waited 35 minutes for firefighters to come for them in a skiff.
UNEXPLAINED LEAP ENDS A RUNNING CAREER
The New York Street bridge over White River is nearly void of ornamentation, its poured concrete piers designed in the no-nonsense brutalist style popular in the 1970s.
From it, on June 4, 1986, a collegiate track star competing in the NCAA Championships in Indianapolis, during the 10,000 meter race, ended her career in a way that she could never explain.
Kathy Ormsby, a pre-med, dean’s list student at North Carolina State University, a month earlier at the Penn Relays had set a U.S. record in the 10,000. Now, at IUPUI’s track stadium, at the 6,500-meter mark in the NCAA championship race, while among the leaders, Ormsby suddenly veered off the track. She ran across a field. She climbed a chain-link fence. She ran west several hundred yards to the bridge, and she dove off.
She landed on the river bank. It was a 40 foot drop. She was paralyzed from the waist down.
“It's been labeled a suicide (attempt),” Ormsby told The Star’s Phil Richards years later. But it wasn’t, she said.
“She has rethought it all,” Richards wrote in 1996. “She has had therapy, talked to psychologists, coaches, teammates, family and friends. She is convinced that what happened resulted from the unhappy confluence of physical, mental, emotional and spiritual factors with stress, pressure, heat, fatigue, delicate chemical balances altered by extremes of exertion and a misguided sense of personal responsibility.”
A BRIDGE WITH A NAME: ASTRONAUT DAVID WOLF BRIDGE
The steel truss bridge that spans White River at 82nd Street was built in 1941 and is the last bridge of its kind still standing in Marion County.
It’s an interesting bridge, made more interesting because it has a name: Astronaut David Wolf Bridge. Wolf, who graduated from the nearby North Central High School in 1974 and crossed the bridge often as a kid, is worth remembering – the guy became an astronaut.
Few other bridges in Indianapolis have names. There is the William “Bill” Spencer Bridge on Meridian Street as Meridian crosses Williams Creek (Spencer was a state lawmaker), and the Meridian Street bridge over Fall Creek is called Joseph W. Summers Memorial Bridge (Summers, too, was a state lawmaker).
But there are many more bridges that are nameless. New York has the George Washington Bridge. Pittsburgh has the Roberto Clemente. In Indianapolis, opportunities abound.
GROUND ZERO FOR BROAD RIPPLE’S INFAMOUS ‘BRIDGE KIDS’
The rainbow-painted bridge over the canal in Broad Ripple, on Guilford Avenue, is by now a sort of trademark of this vibrant commercial district (the bridge has its own Facebook page). But traditionally it was the hangout spot for Broad Ripple’s “bridge kids,” a loose-knit band of ne’er-do-well teens and young adults copping a “Lost Boys” pose and maybe panhandling and in general being nuisances if harmless nuisances.
They date to at least the early ’90s, but of course they’re not the same kids. Like college kids, bridge kids move on and are replaced by younger ones. These days their numbers are greatly diminished.
In April 2012, the rainbow bridge was the scene of a truly touching moment.
Gregory Jarrett was the bridge kids’ Peter Pan in that he tried to sort of look after the others and was, at 34, by far the oldest. Although troubled, Jarrett was by all accounts a kindly person.
A bridge kid with “Turn your wounds into wisdom” tattooed on her foot told me she thought of herself as ugly but when she’d say as much, Jarrett would leap in and tell her she was beautiful.
Jarrett died in April 2012. Having lain down under the Monon bridge over the canal, he fell asleep or passed out, police suspected, and rolled into the canal without ever knowing it. His body was found the next day.
A few nights later, three dozen bridge kids, including some alums who had moved on years ago, gathered on the rainbow bridge to remember their friend, bridge-kid-style. They laughed and cried. They hugged. They reminisced. They heckled a motorist crossing the bridge in an expensive convertible.
They brought flowers with them, and all at once they tossed the flowers into the canal and watched the flowers drift slowly west with the current.
Contact Star reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter @WillRHiggins.