The swing bridge at New Richmond that used to turn for boats

Out in the river bottoms of Manlius Township, where the hamlet of New Richmond sits beside the Kalamazoo River, there’s an iron bridge that used to spin. It was built in 1879 as a swing bridge — the whole center span pivoted on a pier in the middle of the river so boats could pass on either side. In an age when the Kalamazoo still carried real river traffic, a fixed bridge would have been a wall. So they built one that could get out of the way.

The thing is long and lean, an iron truss stretched some 400 feet across the water, and it carried road traffic on 57th Street between Old Allegan Road and the far bank for well over a century. By the 1990s, though, it had given all it had to give, and it closed to cars. That could easily have been the end — plenty of old metal bridges get scrapped at that point. Instead it got rescued. A restoration finished in 2004, and the bridge reopened, this time for people on foot.

Now it’s the heart of New Richmond Bridge Park, a quiet Allegan County park on both banks where the river is wide and slow. You can walk out over the Kalamazoo on a bridge that predates the automobile, put in a kayak, or just watch the water slide by. The old railroad swing bridge stands nearby too, still busy with freight trains.

It’s an easy thing to drive past on the way to somewhere louder. But stop and walk it: not many bridges this old are left anywhere, and fewer still were built to turn.