A Lakeshore Scare -
A Bridge too Near
by Kay Teeter,
June 3, 2010, page 16.....

The demise last fall of the Lake Champlain Bridge between Fort Frederick at Crown Point, New York, and Chimney Point in Addison, Vermont, created havoc. Ferry service between Charlotte and Essex was expanded and free for a time, then suspended for two months while a new service was set up near the bridge; the Basin Harbor Club heroically employed its own pleasure craft to transport foot passengers across the lake until the winter conditions set in. None of this is ancient history to those who suffered money, job and family deprivation during the marine blackout.
The now-demolished bridge was the best known on the west side of Vermont, even while appreciating that the span over the Connecticut to the east is more spectacular. “Ours” was completed in 1929, the end product of a Lake Champlain Bridge Commission created in 1923.
At a meeting of the Charlotte Historical Society, a rapt audience heard Erwin “Red” Clark of Addison give an encompassing talk about the grand opening on August 26, 1929.
An engineering marvel, the bridge, a three-span continuous truss, 1,014 feet in length that with the approaches, viaducts supported by steel columns to connect the deck trusses to each shore, provided 2,900 feet for automobiling enjoyment. Thanks to Bob Beach, as an appendix to “Red’s” narrative, we also enjoyed a movie of that great day in ‘29, a silent record of the unbelievable commotion and a ten-mile-long parade of floats from dozens of Vermont towns. The photography was done by Bob’s grandfather, Allen Penfield Beach, an ace historian, author of The Basin Harbor Story and Lake Champlain as the Centuries Pass. A definitive book, Crossings: A History of Vermont Bridges by Robert McCullough, provided by the Vermont Agency of Transportation and the Vermont Historical Society, walks the reader through 400 examples.
Getting across the lake was not a new problem. Samuel de Brouage Champlain took up where canoes and an assortment of rafts had been employed for centuries. Previous to a bridge, 17 ferry companies had navigated the lake; of course, they ran only half the year and only during daylight hours. The lake’s first established ferry service, known as McNeil’s, started in 1921 and was powered by six horses serving an endless cable. These efforts were baby steps as the pressures of growth culminated in 1923 to force governmental action. The two relevant governors appointed three members each to a commission whose assignment was to select the site to shorten highway travel between the southern Adirondacks and the Green Mountains.
These were men of vision who also saw the need to span the lake’s upper reaches, making very-northern Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine accessible. The Vermont Legislature established the Missisquoi Bay Commission in 1935, and construction of both bridges began. The Alburg to Rouses Point Bridge, designed by the same Boston firm that designed Crown Point to Addison, opened in 1937 and remained until the late 1980s, when it was replaced with a fixed span. Two smaller upper lake crossings, part of New Deal projects, are no longer operating. Knight’s Point at the southern tip of North Hero is connected to Sand Point on Grand Isle by a swing bridge, Vermont’s only movable bridge still capable of operating.
Various powers, including Vermont railroads, had sought that northern crossing. But it took Robert Moses to do an end-run on the democratic process while building roadways and bridges that changed the lives of millions of people. His biography, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro, captures his efforts in 1,344 pages – an exercise in book production power. Beginning in 1924, Moses created roads in New York that eventually outgrew their capacities. To cite one instance, the Southern State Parkway, the most heavily traveled highway in the world, by 1957 handled 30 million cars.
Something had to give. Clearly, expansion of territories was the answer. While working on the Cross Bronx Expressway, he had plans for the Harlem River Drive, the Major Degan, Sheridan and Throg’s Neck Expressways, the Hutchinson River Parkway and the New England Thruway. His power was memorialized in the Robert Moses Power Dam and the Robert Moses State Park-Thousand Islands, located on Barnhart Island in the St. Lawrence River and adjacent parts of the Town of Massena, at the international boundary of the U.S. and Canada. This location is on approximately the same latitude as a point in Essex, New York, just south of Split Rock, and Thompson’s Point in Charlotte.
The rumors of a Moses’ plan to build a bridge across Lake Champlain ending at and running through Thompson’s Point caused vigorous consternation. A large “For Sale” sign posted in 1991 on Split Rock, property owned by the Heurich brothers of Georgetown, Washington, D. C., and Essex, New York, heightened this very upsetting rumor. The land included the beach at Whallon’s Bay, used openly by all and assumed open forever. When one Thompson’s Pointer verged on hysteria, a Charlotte solon handed out a humorous reminder to “relax.”  He assured this resident of the north portion of the Point, on the cliff, that the new interstate would be built on the southern shore of the Point!
The demand for rapid transportation and obstacles to same are the history of the New World. Yet, soon we can utilize a new bridge at Crown Point, which is a modified arch reminiscent of the pale-gray bridge we used and loved. The structural principles inherent in the arch form have not changed from its ancient origins to our present. The fundamentals of a true arch, namely that it carries loads in compression, remain unchanged. Apparently it is still true that “all roads (and therefore bridges) lead to Rome.”  We can enjoy our new but traditional bridge as it takes its place in history.

The design for the proposed bridge to reconnect Chimney Point in Vermont and Crown Point in New York was approved by both states and voted most popular of six submitted to a citizens’ survey. It features a Network Tied Arch center with traditional steel plate girder approach spans. Travel lanes will be 11 feet wide, with five-foot shoulders that will help accommodate larger trucks and farm vehicles, as well as provide ample room for bicyclists. Sidewalks will be built on both sides of the bridge. The $69.6 million contract for the bridge has been awarded to Flatiron Constructors Incorporated of Boulder, Colorado. Work will begin right away and is expected to be completed by the end of September 2011. The temporary ferry operated by Lake Champlain Transportation near the bridge location will continue to run 24-hours-per-day, free of charge until the bridge is opened to traffic. A rendering of the proposed bridge is on the New York Department of Transportation website at nysdot.gov/lakechamplainbridge.