Tag Archives: pedestrians

Grove City Bridges

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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.

Grove City Bridges

Grove City Cross-Section

  1. I don’t know if this is true in other states, but Pennsylvania lets municipalities of any size call themselves cities. ↩︎

Nutcracker Village

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This season is the 10th anniversary of the Steubenville1 Nutcracker Village. Each year, the town of Steubenville, OH, sets out a growing number of human-sized nutcrackers each individually decorated. While they are advertised as 6-feet tall, there is some variation in their heights. A few, including “Santa Claus” and “Henry Harley Hank,” tower over the others. A few, including “Jane Banks” and “Michael Banks,” who I’m pretty sure are standing outside a bank, are eye-to-eye for children.

Over the course of the first three years of the Nutcracker Village 150 Nutcrackers were made. Today, there are over 200. (Learn more at the official website.) Shelly2 and I went on a mini-adventure after New Year’s to see these Nutcrackers and test how strong I am for traveling and for urbantraipsing after over a year with Long COVID. While I am tired and sore, it is a manageable level of fatigue, giving me hope that in 2025 I will be able to resume a moderate level of urbantraipsing and travel while continuing to share posts from previous trips.

Between the two of us, Shelly and I photographed 145 of the nutcrackers and saw at least 40 more (we were cold and tired toward the end of our walk and passed by many without stopping to photograph them). Below I share a sampling of our favorite nutcrackers. There is quite a range of nutcrackers from the standard looking “Junior” to the punny “Dr. Cara Lot” and “Fashionutsa Holly,” the far left nutcracker in the window display, to the ornate “By Way of Budapest.” A wind storm that passed through the region a couple weeks ago damaged the Ohio State nutcracker, our waitress’s favorite, so we stopped at Drosselmeyer’s Nutcracker Shoppe where I posed with the ornament version of it.

While Steubenville is only 45 miles from Pittsburgh, making this a very easy day trip adventure, we chose to spend the night. This enabled us to better manage my energy level and to explore more of the town. We enjoyed gyro, egg, and cheese pitas for breakfast from Yorgo’s Gyros & Potatoes and I got a mint chai pick-me-up from Leonardo’s Coffeehouse, the headquarters for the Nutcracker Village. I never would have thought that mint would go with chai, but it was a delicious combination.

  1. This is my second urbantraipsing visit to Steubenville. In 2017, while Dad and I were exploring bridges along the Ohio River on our way to see the full eclipse in Tennessee, we stopped in Steubenville to walk the Market Street Bridge. ↩︎
  2. Shelly is the host and executive producer of the podcast With Bowl and Spoon. We started traveling together the summer of 2023 when we went to Erie. She’s a fun travel companion and great at posing with the Steubenville nutcrackers and Erie frogs and fish. ↩︎

Mid-Hudson Bridge

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Half a mile downriver from the Walkway Over the Hudson (slightly closer as the crow flies) is the Mid-Hudson Bridge, so named for being halfway between New York and Albany. After being completely exposed to the noonday July sun on the Walkway Over the Hudson, I learned the relief of shade that can be had on a bridge, particularly when it incorporates some truss-like structure like the Mid-Hudson Bridge. I remember being completely in the shade while walking the Manhattan Bridge, but as that was in late December it had a completely different effect.

Taking in the Mid-Hudson Bridge added significantly to the length of my walk, but was worth it for the shade and the ability to add another bridge to my ever-growing list of walked bridges. I also encountered signs for “Bridge Music” on my way to this bridge which intrigued me and which I’ll explain further later.

Once again, additional fencing is provided on the portion of the bridge that crosses over the railroad tracks. Other than that pinch point and one or two other pinch points, my photographs suggest to me that this was a very pleasant bridge to walk. And overall, I think it was, but I was quite spooked by the number of signs warning pedestrians not to aggravate the nesting peregrine falcons on the piers. It wasn’t clear from these signs what behaviors would be sufficient to aggravate these predators, but I took the signs to mean that these birds were more sensitive than the ones found on tall buildings in Pittsburgh and curtailed my observations of and from the bridge accordingly.

I also tested out taking video of a portion of the walk of the bridge. This is something I have been considering as another way to share the experience of bridge walking with my readers. The video is below the sample of photographs. As I am holding my phone in my hand to take the video, there is a little bounce from my gait and some other slight stability issues.

Walkway Over the Hudson

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I don’t remember how I first heard about the Walkway Over the Hudson, but it was several years before I developed the habit of walking bridges. Even at that time it sounded like a cool place to check out. Once I became a bridge-walker, it became a must-experience site. Over a decade later, I finally walked the Walkway Over the Hudson.

The Walkway Over the Hudson crosses the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie, NY. It opened in 1889 as a railroad bridge. It closed in 1974 after being damaged by fire and reopened as a renovated pedestrian bridge in 2009. It is both a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark and on the National Register of Historic Places. At 1.28 miles it claims to be the longest pedestrian bridge in the world.

It is also 212 feet above ground or river level. In discussing my experience of climbing to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, I glossed over the fact that I almost didn’t reach the top due to my discomfort with heights and instead focused on the fact that claustrophobia almost prevented me from coming back down. Proportions and railing heights have a significant impact on whether I can manage heights. The Whispering Walk inside the base of the dome in St. Paul’s was too narrow and enclosed for me to handle the height above the floor (98 feet). The Walkway Over the Hudson, on the other hand, was quite wide having once carried two railroad tracks side-by-side. And so despite being more than twice as high up as the Whispering Walk, I did not experience much trouble with the height. I was more concerned about the possibility of the wind tearing my phone/camera out of my hand and over the edge.

Despite the potential damage that objects falling off the side of the bridge could cause, extra high barriers to prevent that are only located over the railroad tracks. As I’ve discussed in previous posts, some bridges have extra fencing only along portions of their walkways, typically over railroads and sometimes over automobile roads. The extra fencing on the Walkway Over the Hudson is from a time after it was common to curve the top, creating a cage-like feel, but before the need for extra height was incorporated into the design of the bridge itself.

There is no shade on a deck-truss bridge 212 feet off the ground. On a hot, July day, you feel the full force of the sun when taking such an exposed 1.28 mile walk starting at 11:30. If I hadn’t discovered that there was another bridge that I could walk across, I probably would have opted to take the shuttle back.

A Vibrant, Green City

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In Vancouver, greenery sprouts up everywhere despite its density. There are green parks, green roofs, green balconies, and even green bikes. The Vancouver Convention Center with its tiers of green roofs inspired me to design an Architectural Dessert Masterpiece of it. Unfortunately, my health challenges in the following months prevented me from executing it and I have since forgotten the plans.

I spent much time exploring the engaging architecture of the Vancouver Convention Center and comparing it to the stand-offish convention center in Pittsburgh. Both convention centers pay homage to the natural environment of their respective cities. Vancouver’s mimics the mountains across the inlet with its sloping green roofs. The roof of Pittsburgh’s convention center mimics the curves of the suspension cables on the Three Sisters Bridges and intended to have a waterfall cascading down its curve and into the river, but this ended up being infeasible. Both convention centers provide popular connections to the waterfront trails, but Vancouver’s Convention Center invites people to engage with the building while Pittsburgh’s repulses. Both have outward facing tenant spaces. Vancouver’s is filled with popular bars and restaurants. Pittsburgh’s has a underutilized Jimmy John’s. Vancouver’s architecture creates an inviting and human-scale design while Pittsburgh’s oversized blank walls are oppressive.

And if that list of contrasts isn’t enough to convince you of my opinions of Vancouver’s and Pittsburgh’s convention centers, in the thousands of photos I’ve taken in Pittsburgh, none are specifically of the convention center. I took numerous photos of the Vancouver Convention Center because it was interesting and because I intended to recreate it in desserts. However, I only have photos of Pittsburgh’s Convention Center as a building that happens to be next to a bridge or that is noticeable from bird’s eye views of the city.

Vancouver’s Greenery

Vancouver’s Convention Center

Pittsburgh’s Convention Center

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Vancouver Bridges

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I can’t believe I never posted anything about my 2016 Alaskan cruise trip. It was one of my top 3 monumental trips, up there with my first train trip to Colorado (8th birthday) and my first international trip touring England and Wales (14th birthday). By the time I was 10, I decided that I would take an Alaskan cruise for my 30th birthday. By my mid-20s, I realized that wasn’t going to happen, but then when I was 29, my friend and her family were planning their annual cruise and picked Alaska. I asked to join them and a few weeks after my birthday celebrated my 30th while cruising in Alaska.

The trip was amazing. I gathered enough materials and felt excited enough about what I saw and experienced to be energized to share the trip with my readers. However, as soon as I got home from the cruise, life overwhelmed me. The months after the cruise were when I first learned to hate my job, I was house hunting, and my appendix burst. This plethora of life distractions prevented me from blogging.

Now, however, I have an opportunity to catch up on the trips and traipses that I intended to blog about but never did. I’ve had Long COVID since November 2023, which has reduce my ability to do new urban traipsing, but on days when I’ve had energy and inspiration, I am revisiting former trips to share with you. Through the rest of this year and throughout 2025 (and maybe beyond), I’ll be sharing these retrospective reflections of my past travels.

My 2016 Alaskan cruise started in Vancouver and ended in Anchorage. I added a few nights on either end to allow me to explore those cities. Naturally, I found my way to bridges in Vancouver. At this point in time (8 years after the fact), I don’t remember which was the instigating factor, the bridges or the store. Whichever inspired me first, I took advantage of walking over the Granville Bridge to visit Hammered & Pickled on Granville Island and returning by way of Burrard Street Bridge. I chose Hammered & Pickled for my destination to satisfy my curiosity on what kind of pickled they covered: pickled vegetables, pickled metal, or pickled people. It turned out it was a silversmith selling handcrafted jewelry.

Oddly, from my walks across the Granville and Burrard Street Bridges to and from Hammered & Pickled, I took more photos of the less structurally interesting bridge. This may have been the impact of being tired and dehydrated on the return or of the construction on the Burrard Street Bridge. However, the bridge that I took the most photos of in Vancouver was one I didn’t walk: the Lions Gate Bridge. I biked the waterfront trail underneath this bridge, rode over it by bus on the way to Grouse Mountain, and later passed under the bridge as the cruise ship left the Vancouver harbor.

Granville and Burrard Street Bridges

Lions Gate Bridge

Buffalo Waterfront I

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Waterfronts are often the reason why cities exist where they are. However, in the last 50-75 years, we have built barriers cutting ourselves off from these natural amenities. I’ve written about the experience of trying to reach waterfronts in Erie and Chicago. Buffalo echoes those experiences, but with a happier ending.

Before making an official urbantraipsing trip to Buffalo, I had encountered the freeways around the city multiple times. The flying roadway carrying Route 5 that starts near downtown and travels over a sizable portion of the industrial area along the waterfront is a memorable piece of infrastructure. And one that I had assumed would contribute to the cutting off of the waterfront from the city.

Route 5 and I-190 meet at the southwestern corner of downtown Buffalo creating a knot of an interchange and on/off ramps that block access between downtown and the waterfront. But, beyond that point of intersection, both roads are elevated leaving open multiple pathways underneath for pedestrians, cars, and transit. They still create a psychological barrier – it never feels welcoming to pass underneath overpasses like these – but the physical connection is there. And once you pass through the barrier, there is much to see and do at Canalside.

The Barrier

The Waterfront

Buffalo Bridges: Delaware Park

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In my meanderings in Delaware Park as part of my exploration of World’s Fair sites, I walked over two interesting bridges: the Whirly-Twirly Bridge and the Lincoln Parkway Bridge. The Whirly-Twirly Bridge is the best named bridge of the 100+ bridges that I’ve encountered since I started walking bridges (even beating out the Big Dam Bridge). It also provides one of the few pedestrian links across the Scajaquada Expressway which divides Delaware Park. The Lincoln Parkway Bridge was built in 1900, perhaps as part of the 1901 Pan-American World’s Fair. If so, the story of this bridge gets drowned out in the attention paid to the temporary Triumphal Bridge with its massive pylons that lasted only as long as the fair. From my observation, the Lincoln Parkway Bridge is a nice, modest scale, stone arch bridge that acknowledges the indigenous people of the area in its sculpture. I was able to get a nice lake-eye view of these sculptures from a rented paddle boat that sadly included a prohibition on paddling underneath the bridge.

Whirly-Twirly Bridge

Lincoln Parkway Bridge

Buffalo’s Rainbow City

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Having now been to two former World’s Fair sites, I felt compelled to round it out with a third. Weeks before COVID hit, I was in the planning phase for a trip to Buffalo when I discovered that they had held a World’s Fair in 1901. I had found my third site, though the visit was delayed several years from the fallout of COVID and life.

As I got off the bus at the end of a bridge over an expressway, I had moment of panic before seeing I was right next to the History Museum and a quiet residential neighborhood, just as I had intended. There were several parallels between this site and those I explored in San Francisco and Chicago, but the feel of the place was completely different. There was the characteristic lagoon, or in this case lake, surrounded by park, but the park and lake were designed by Frederick Law Olmsted long before the idea of the fair was born. Like Chicago, the remaining fair building(s) was used as a museum, and while the architecture is intended to inspire awe and perhaps intimidation, it is the normal awe and intimidation of the average temple to art or history seen in many cities and not the massive scale of San Francisco’s Palace. The park is also bisected by a road with dangerously fast traffic, but there are multiple safe pedestrian crossing points over and under (including the Whirly-Twirly Bridge). There was a Japanese Garden here as well, but it was installed decades after the fair and was illustrative of the fact that this site had a life before the fair and continues to have an on-going life after the fair.

The remainder of the fair site between the park and the railroad tracks where the fair had a station has been fully redeveloped. Over half of that area is now residential neighborhood(s) with a variety of housing types from modest single-family dwellings to large homes with security fencing and landscaping staff. (Passing these houses and taking photos, I again felt the potential for someone to approach and question my belonging and right to explore.) There were also two-family dwellings and apartments. I passed two schools, a former church, some industrial properties, a paddock, and a strip mall. One of the residential streets had a sign acknowledging the past as the site of the 1901 Pan American Exposition. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have know I was on the site of a former World’s Fair without having carefully studied the map of the fair beforehand. I felt as though I was in any other neighborhood of any other city that is flat and that has residents who have at least a little, though in many parts it was clear that the residents had a lot.

As I had unintentionally read about the World’s Fairs in San Francisco and Chicago before visiting those sites, I decided that I needed to intentionally read about Buffalo’s before going so that there would be some consistency in my approach. One of the points that Margaret Creighton reiterated in her book The Electrifying Fall of Rainbow City was that Buffalo was trying to outdo Chicago (they picked the Rainbow City theme and lighting scheme to be in direct contrast to Chicago’s White City). In the end, and certainly not helped by the fact that President McKinley was shot at the fair, Buffalo did not have the success they sought in receipts or in numbers of visitors.

Having now visited both Chicago and Buffalo’s fair sites, I would say that over 100 years later, Buffalo has had the greater long-term success on its fair site than Chicago. The entire area once covered by the fair is now, and has been for some time, an actively used location. From the park with a number of tourists and residents enjoying all the amenities (even in the middle of a Monday at the beginning of the school year) to the homes to the businesses, Buffalo’s fair site must by this point have long outstripped Chicago’s in number of visitors/residents/users and in tax revenue/receipts.

Chicago Waterfront III

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I’ve had multiple aborted experiences in Chicago. In 2013, I aborted an attempt to bike to the 1893 World’s Fair site. In 2019, I aborted an attempt to reach the waterfront. But during the eventually aborted bike ride, I experienced several miles of interesting waterfront. I don’t recall how I got to and from the waterfront for the bike ride as Chicago has the classic US urban problem of using highways to divide the waterfront from the rest of city. Once I was on the waterside, I enjoyed a variety of natural, architectural, and sculptural sights. I even unknowingly captured the remaining buildings from Chicago’s other World’s Fair (post pending).