Iowa State University Alumni Association| online edition | winter 2004

 


WINTER 2004
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>>Bridges: Designing, Building, Preserving

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THE ARTISTRY OF THE BOW BRIDGE:
TOM RYAN FIGHTS TO SAVE A HISTORIC BRIDGE
ONE BRUSH STROKE AT A TIME

On a misty morning in early October, Tom Ryan sets up his artist’s easel on the tangled shore of the Sacandaga River. He clamps a clean piece of watercolor paper to the wooden backing, and looks around him, assessing the colors of the morning. He carefully squeezes pigments onto a plastic palette, removes his brushes, fills a small plastic container with water, and begins.

Tom Ryan has painted this scene many times. He has canoed and kayaked with his family in the whitewater of this river, just a few miles from his boyhood home on the edge of the Adirondacks. He has carried his painting supplies down a drainage ditch, onto a railroad trestle, and across slippery river rock to document a unique and beautiful scene that can only be painted here, in Hadley, N.Y.

The Sacandaga River flows into the Hudson River at Hadley, and its raging water physically divides the community of 1,800 people. In 1885, the Berlin Iron and Bridge Company of East Berlin, Conn., was hired to build a bridge over the Sacandaga, near the confluence of the rivers, to connect the town’s two segments. But the result was more than a thoroughfare across the water. It was a bridge that, according to the National Park Service, is considered extraordinarily rare and significant in American bridge-building art.

Officially named the Old Corinth Road Bridge, the steel structure is known locally as simply the Bow Bridge. For years a part of the dramatic setting of the Sacandaga River, the Bow Bridge design is unique among metal truss bridges. Of the approximately 600 bridges designed and built by the Berlin Iron and Bridge Company, only three were built with the unusual curved “bow” above and below the deck. The Bow Bridge at Hadley is the only one that still remains today.

For many years, the Bow Bridge served its purpose: transporting people and goods across the Sacandaga River. Its wooden deck clattered from the sound of horses and buggies, and in later years, automobiles. More recently, the bridge provided a spectacular vantage point to watch whitewater kayaking, rafting, tubing, and canoeing on the river. But over the years, the bridge fell into disrepair. In 1977, the Bow Bridge was placed on the National Register of Historic Places,
but in 1983 it was closed to all traffic, including pedestrian. For 20 years, the town of Hadley has been without its roadway across the river.

Tom Ryan grew up in Schuylerville, a small town in scenic upstate New York, not far from the Hadley Bow Bridge. He attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in nearby Troy, N.Y., graduating with a bachelor’s degree in building construction in 1963. He and his wife, Bobbi, then enrolled at Iowa State, graduating in 1965, Tom with a master’s in architectural engineering and Bobbi with a B.S. in botany. The Ryans lived in Pammel Court and started a family in Ames before returning home to upstate New York.

Ryan pursued an engineering career for 32 years but always had an interest in art. Originally an oil painter, Ryan switched his medium to watercolor in the mid-’80s when his wife gave him a watercolor set for his birthday. He retired from engineering in 1997 to pursue his art and to teach watercolor painting. Ryan’s paintings depict the natural beauty of the Adirondacks, and his work is displayed in galleries throughout the region.

The Bow Bridge that Ryan first glimpsed as he passed beneath it in a canoe in the 1970s began to draw his interest again – this time as a painter, engineer, and historic preservationist. As an artist, Ryan captured on his canvas the visual impact of the bridge in the
scenic gorge of the Sacandaga River. As an engineer, he had a technical interest in the art and design of the structure. And as a historic preservationist, Ryan believed it was important to preserve this significant treasure for future generations.

Not everyone in Hadley, N.Y., agreed with Ryan’s viewpoint. Although his paintings depicted the Bow Bridge as a delicate, airy work of art, Ryan said most of the townspeople viewed it as a “decrepit piece of rusted steel,” and they wanted it torn down and replaced with a “real” bridge. After being closed to traffic for nearly 20 years, the bridge was slated for demolition in 2000.

That year, Ryan applied for and received an artist grant from the Saratoga County Arts Council from which he produced a 96-page book on the history and significance of the Bow Bridge. The book contains more than a dozen reproductions of his watercolor paintings and hand- tinted photographs as well as historic
photos and illustrations, current photos, drawings, paintings by other regional artists, and watercolor paintings by local schoolchildren.

Since the book was published, several public hearings have been held on the future of the Bow Bridge. The debate: practicality and function vs. historical significance and aesthetic beauty. The result: a compromise.

“The river divides the town of Hadley into two parts, and that bridge is the link,” Ryan said. “The residents really want a bridge they can drive across. The community is very small, and there aren’t sufficient funds to rehabilitate the Bow Bridge as a pedestrian bridge and build a new bridge as well, which would be the ideal solution. So the compromise is that they will restore the Bow Bridge to traffic, which will solve the local needs of the town and hopefully solve the issue of saving this wonderful, historic bridge.”

Admittedly, Ryan isn’t completely happy with the compromise. Reconstructing the bridge to make it accessible to logging trucks, school buses, and fire trucks will render the delicate bridge “clunky” and heavy, with steel reinforcements and a railing system.

“My real wish is that they would close the bridge to traffic permanently and use it only for pedestrians and bicycles,” Ryan said. But he’s pleased that the bridge will continue to exist in some form, and he thinks his book had an impact on that decision.

“The book certainly raised public awareness in this bridge, and it had a positive impact. I think that the book certainly helped preserve the bridge from that point of view.”

Read on | Building Better Bridges