Grove City Bridges

I bought my first car in 2021. It ended up having a lot of problems. The first time I tried to drive to Erie, it started shaking like it was going to spontaneously break apart into a million pieces, just like a cartoon. Instead, it went into limp home mode and I turned around at the next exit, which was the middle of nowhere. After several repairs and a period of no further incidents, the following year I was ready to try again. But first, I tested the car to see if it could handle Rt. 79.

I knew of Grove City as an exit about halfway to Erie and as the closest outlet mall to Pittsburgh. I decided to aim for the actual Borough of Grove City¹ as a destination to explore while testing my car’s ability to handle the speed limit and hills of Rt. 79. Naturally, since I arrived safely and knew nothing about the town, I set out to walk the bridges.

A town of 2.7 square miles and less than 8,000 residents, Grove City has several bridges over Wolf Creek and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the town’s premier pedestrian bridge, Rainbow Bridge (pictured above), was closed due to construction activities in the area. I discovered a second, unmapped pedestrian bridge over a small tributary to Wolf Creek, which I crossed only to see a sign on the other side claiming the bridge was not a throughway and directing people to use the sidewalks on the street to reach Grove City College’s main campus.

While the bridges themselves were structurally uninteresting, except for the Rainbow Bridge, I visited a throughout cross-section of town in walking them….which is the point of my bridge walking habit. My path took me through the college campus, the now less prominent industrial area, the large homes built for the boss class of the industries, the small homes built for the industrial workers, and the business district, both the car oriented portion and the historic portion. There are several bridgeless neighborhoods that I did not visit, but even without them, I learned a lot about the town in a short space of time.