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Suspense Story | THE SWINGING LIFE AND TIMES OF THE FALL CREEK SUSPENSION BRIDGE

aNIGHTTIME CROSSING OF THE Fall Creek suspension bridge goes a long way toward explaining the mythology that surrounds it. A pair of floodlights casts a web of shadows over the arcing span, surrounded on all sides by darkness. It is a distinctly eerie passage from the Arts Quad on one side to Cornell Heights on the other, steel cables quivering as water rushes 138 feet below. Campus legend has long insisted that a midnight kiss shared here marks a couple for marriage. Rebuffing an advance can be just as perilous. "Everybody knows that if you refuse a kiss, the bridge will collapse," one coy female student says. "A guy told me that, and I didn't really believe him, but better safe than sorry."

This past summer, the bridge received some preventive maintenance to ensure it will remain safe for years to come.Workers replaced rusting cover plates, applied a slip-resistant surface to the deck, and gave it a fresh coat of blue-gray paint. The facelift is the first major work done on the bridge since the late 1970s, according to University structural engineer Gary Kachinsky.

Three bridges have spanned Fall Creek since the University's founding, the first a low-slung structure sited 500 feet upstream of the current position. Around 1900 it was replaced by a delicate-looking steel suspension bridge designed and financed by Edward Wyckoff 1889, the typewriter heir who was then developing the farmland across the gorge into a residential neighborhood. (Wyckoff supposedly drew up the plans as a project for an engineering course--which he failed.) While more robust than its predecessor, its height, tendency to sway, and narrow walkway--half as wide as the modern bridge--made for unsettling passages. Henry Jacoby, a turn-of-the-century engineering professor, supposedly refused to cross it, instead trekking to the sturdier College Avenue bridge. Others were less cautious: according to the March 1961 Alumni News, an entire ROTC company once marched across in close order.

By 1959,Wyckoff 's bridge was finally deemed unsafe and dismantled. The current bridge, which opened in January 1961 and cost $75,000, proved to be a major upgrade. Designed by civil engineering professor Solomon Hollister and built by Bethlehem Steel--the same firm that erected San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge--it was a stout 270-foot span suspended on two-inch-thick main cables from twin forty-one-foot towers, with a concrete walkway wide enough to accommodate snowplows in winter. "I doubt that so much high-level talent was ever spent on such a small bridge," said engineering professor William McGuire, MCE '47, an assistant on the project, in 2001.

The modern bridge's reassuring solidity and safety railings may inspire more confidence, but some of the romance and drama seems to have disappeared with Wyckoff 's old creation, as a Daily Sun editorial opined in 1961: "I mean, you know you're going to make it before you start out. So why bother?"

-- Michael Morisy '07

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