Portland's 1890 iron bridge still carries cars

Most towns scrapped their iron bridges decades ago. Portland kept its, and one of them is from 1890. The Bridge Street Bridge crosses the Grand River right in the middle of downtown, two spans of riveted metal running about 210 feet end to end. It’s a truss bridge — the kind whose strength comes from a lattice of triangles rather than a poured slab — built by the Groton Bridge Company, a name you can still find stamped into bridges across the Midwest.

A bridge this old usually doesn’t survive a road department’s spreadsheet. In 1890 it cost a few thousand dollars; by the late 1900s, replacing it would have run far more, and a new concrete deck is always the cheaper, duller answer. Portland went the other way. When the bridge was rehabbed in 1990, the work was paid for with the state’s Critical Bridge program — money meant to fix bridges rather than tear them out — and it became one of the early Michigan cases of restoring a historic span instead of demolishing it. The American Society of Civil Engineers later marked it as a historic engineering landmark.

It still does its job. The bridge sits inside the Portland Downtown Historic District, carries one-way traffic, and has a walkway down one side, so you can cross it on foot and feel the deck flex a little under a passing truck. It’s also one knot in a larger habit: Portland hung onto several of its 1800s and early-1900s truss bridges and strung them together with the Portland Riverwalk, so a single afternoon walk can take you over a century and a half of ironwork without leaving town.