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ST. JOHNS BRIDGE
LIGHTING DESIGN PLANS
A dedicated and spirited group of community volunteers, known as the St. Johns Bridge Lighting Committee (SJBLC), has been working to achieve a long sought-after dream of the St. Johns and Linnton neighborhoods -- to install permanent accent lighting on the St. Johns Bridge. While the SJBLC is a separate non-profit focusing solely on Portland’s most downstream bridge, Paddy Tillett, Chair of Willamette Light Brigade, has attended many of their meetings in order to liaise between the two groups.
The St. Johns Bridge, considered by many the most graceful and beautiful of all the bridges in the city, and perhaps the entire West Coast, remains in the dark at night, except for a single row of street lights. Committee members successfully applied for a $25,000 Metro grant specifically for creating a lighting design. They sent a request for proposals to a select group of lighting design firms around the country.
Interface Engineering, a local firm, worked with nationally acclaimed artist Tad Savinar to create a lighting design that has been accepted by SJBLC. A 3-D model of the St. Johns Bridge was constructed by Interface Engineering and proved invaluable in visualizing the lighting design options.
SJBLC is currently working with Oregon Dept. of Transportation (ODOT), the owner of the bridge, and other agencies to insure the lighting design meets all necessary standards. While ODOT is doing some construction upgrades on the bridge, the SJBLC is working on the fund-raising plan for their lighting endeavor.
For more information about this group's efforts to light the St. Johns Bridge,
please contact johnburton@earthlink.net (John Burton).
BRIDGE FACTS
This, the farthest downstream of Portland’s Willamette River bridges, was petitioned for in 1924 by over 26,000 Portlanders who felt the St. Johns Ferry was inadequate for the growing industries of the St. Johns (east end) and Linnton (west end) communities. Others had opposed it, feeling it was an extravagance; ironically construction began a month before “the crash” of 1929. It is still the least traveled of the area’s large vehicular bridges.
However, it is also the Willamette Valley’s only suspension bridge, a designated Portland Historical Landmark, eligible for the National Register of Historic Places and considered especially lovely because of the gothic shape of it piers and its twin 408-foot towers. “It is the ethical duty of the builders to make bridges beautiful as well as useful," said design engineer David B. Steinman. Those gothic shapes inspired the name of Cathedral Park (beneath the bridge’s east end).
The center and two side spans of its highway deck were made high enough to accommodate masts of vessels heading upstream to Portland. The spans are suspended from two 2,645-foot-long cables which are supported by those towers and by anchorages below. The anchorages on the west end are buried in sloping 85’ tunnels in the basalt hillside; those on the east are above-ground but concealed in concrete structures that blend with the piers. Stiffening trusses running along both sides of the deck add rigidity to resist the 8,500 tons of cable pull.
Like the ferry it replaced and the community at its east end, the bridge is named for settler James Johns, appreciated for his support of early schools. Its dedication ceremony was the highlight of Portland’s 1931 Rose Festival and reportedly included biplanes flying beneath the bridge. Multnomah County owned and maintained the structure until the state took responsibility for it in 1976.
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