I didn’t have to go far to learn more about Grove City to flesh out the observations I made while walking the bridges. The Borough helpfully installed history markers along the historic business core of South Broad Street. I photographed 33 of the plaques, which I think is all, for anyone interested in virtually visiting these history markers. Of course, these could also be used in the debate over art vs. sign as they also fall into the nuanced mess of the grey area.
My day job for the last decade is working with zoning ordinances. *Yawn,* right? Except I find it surprisingly intriguing. For example, when I visited Grove City in 2022, I was in the middle of writing new model sign regulations for zoning. The puzzle pieces for this effort included incorporating Supreme Court rulings on the constitutionality of sign regulations and making the regulations easier to understand and follow.1 So signs were already on my mind when I encountered Grove City’s parking sculptures and my brain exploded.
Besides the century-old battle between planners and billboard companies, the most difficult thing about sign regulations is the definition of sign. Art cannot be regulated by zoning, but signs can. However, there is a lot of grey between art and sign. Grove City exemplifies that grey area.
Grove City has a series of outdoor sculptures that incorporate directional signage for public parking areas. Based on a strict interpretation of Pittsburgh’s definition of sign (which interpretation frequently got me into arguments with my boss when I was zoning staff for Pittsburgh), the minute any component of a piece of artwork contains a sign, the whole piece of art becomes a sign (see Pittsburgh’s Zoning Ordinance Section 919.01.C.1). The phrase “or any structure designed to carry the above visual information” supports my interpretation that Grove City’s parking sculptures would not be permitted in Pittsburgh because they would not comply with the sign regulations.
Fortunately, Grove City’s zoning ordinance measures a sign only on the “separate individual letters, words, or graphic elements on the background” (see Grove City Zoning Ordinance Section 702, page 72 of 84 in the PDF). As the structure doesn’t count in the calculation of sign area in Grove City, I can now understand how parking sign sculptures could be created without violating their own ordinance.
If you are a frequent visitor to urbantraipsing, you know I don’t typically take selfies. However, I did with the first parking sculpture I encountered in Grove City to provide a sense of scale. These are substantial structures. I am standing in the selfie…and, for those who don’t know me in person, I am 6 feet tall.
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.
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.
LeapFrog! was a fundraiser in Erie, PA, in 2004. In 2023, Amy H.’s map of Erie’s frogs helped us find “Thrifty Hopper” by Doug Vicary and Walnut Creek Middle School Student Artists in a courtyard off of French Street.
The Mid-Hudson Bridge has a unique additional feature. In 2009, Joseph Bertolozzi used the bridge as the sole instrument in his sound-art installation Bridge Music (see Bertolozzi’s official website for more information). There are two listening stations on the bridge, one at each pier, and those driving across the bridge can also access the music on their car radio. The full Bridge Music is available on CD and Bertolozzi has several YouTube videos of the music. Below is a sample of the music I captured in a video with views of the Hudson River and the two bridges (the Walkway Over the Hudson is the second bridge).
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.
LeapFrog! was a fundraiser in Erie, PA, in 2004. After searching for several frogs hidden inside buildings in 2023, it was refreshing to spot “One Hopper” by Ben Gibson as we rounded the corner at E 10th and French. Amy H.’s map of Erie’s frogs led us to this location.
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.
LeapFrog! was a fundraiser in Erie, PA, in 2004. Amy H.’s map helped us find this one in the interior courtyard of the Avalon Hotel in 2023. Shelly then challenged “Art-thurian King” by Jodi Staniunas Hopper to his sword.
urbantraipsing 