Seacoast History Blog # 123 
July 28, 2011

I thought it was just another routine call from a reporter on the Memorial Bridge that has connected Portsmouth, NH to Kittery, ME since 1923. I didn’t know it was the death knell. So I’m blabbing away about the importance of the old lift bridge for 20 minutes, sounding all upbeat and hopeful, when the reporter says something like, “Didn’t you hear? It’s all over. They closed it forever.”  It was one of those, “Oh-by-the-way-your-Uncle-Harry-died” moments. Certainly he didn’t mean forever, like in “eternity,” but more like when Hans Solo was trapped forever in that piece of alien metal. I mean, we know he’s going to get out of there eventually. (Continued below)

I figured it was like the closing of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard. They opened the thing in 1800, and they’ve been talking about closing it for 200 years. But it’s still open. I said to the reporter something that sounded clever at the time about how, no matter what bridge they build, we’ll always be crossing the Memorial Bridge in our minds. Then another reporter called and it dawned on me that, maybe this time, they weren’t kidding.

So I suppose I should say a few kind words at this juncture, but I’m largely speechless. I never thought for a moment that the old girl would actually end up in the scrap heap. Portsmouth is all about saving ancient architecture in the nick of time.

To be honest, I was more fascinated yesterday with the latest episode of the History Detectives that was filmed, in part, in our beloved Portsmouth Athenaeum. The owner of an old telescope thought it might have been used in the Revolutionary War. After digging through old documents at the Athenaeum, the detectives from the History Channel guessed that the telescope might, instead, have belonged to William Pepperell of Kittery and been used at the Siege of Louisbourg in 1745.

The show is very well done, high production values and the whole nine yards. Of course we all know (or maybe you don’t) that the detectives don’t actually detect on the spot. They are like nrewsreaders, acting out the research that’s already been scripted. I’m sure keeper Tom Hardiman did 90% of the digging ahead of time, but it looks good on TV and adds the sense of drama that makes history interesting to the masses. The episode didn’t prove that the telescope actually belonged to Pepperrell, but it implied as much. And who cares? Nobody cares about the attack on Louisbourg these days except us local historians and all the re-enactors in Cape Bretton who are wandering the reconstructed fort as if it is still 1745. We need all the PR we can get.

Anyway, my mind was much more on that tidbit than on the ultimate wrecking of our beloved erector set, the nation’s oldest lift-bridge. And I probably won’t have much to say until it sinks in. In 1922 before the bridge went up that part of town was a dead end anyway. The Gloucester House, a bordello, had been the last establishment on State Street until the “red light” district closed in 1912. All the main roads in town ran to the sea, or evolved out of the sea, but they ran smack into the waterfront, and by 1922 the waterfront in the South End was a junkyard of old warehouses, rotted docks, water tanks, and coal pockets. Memorial Bridge changed all that by creating a direct link for the first time in history between downtown Portsmouth and downtown Kittery. A decade later the Prescott Sisters spent a million bucks turning the junky waterfront into a park.

How the bridges spanning the PIscataqua River worked before that is fuzzy. Before the Memorial Bridge the spot was the ferry landing. Workers at the shipyard, the driving force of the local economy at the time, had to take a boat to work from Portsmouth and back. There was no Interestate-95 bridge high in the air as there is today. There was only the wooden, and later metal span of the Sarah Long Bridge that now has to carry the bulk of the traffic to Kittery. If something happens to that baby, Kittery is screwed for the three years it will take to get a new bridge in place.

So my immediate response is not yet about the death of the bridge, but of the plight of the merchants and restaurants on Badger’s Island and downtown Kittery. They’re going to need help. I suggested to one reporter that we should make everyone in Portsmouth pledge to visit that area at lease once a week until the new bridge opens.

My other reaction goes toward the design of the new bridge. Apparently there are three finalists. Have you seen the designs? I haven’t. If we have to lose our beloved erector set, I hope we don’t try to fake a copy. I’d rather see something exciting from the future. Memorial Bridge was a high-tech wonder, lifting 80 tons of road up in the air dozens of times a day. Whatever replaces her needs to be awesome, not mediocre like poor Sarah Mildred Long. Memorial Bridge is a Portsmouth icon along with the tugs and the North Church steeple. Its replacement needs to be iconic too.

The sad part will come when they rip her down and drag her away. Maybe Bill Paarlberg will do another of his great illustrations – a memorial for a Memorial Bridge in which she comes alive like a giant Transformer and begins beating the crap out of some sea monster, or maybe the Republican Party.

I hate that part in the news where the reporter stuff the microphone in the mothers tearful face. “So how did you feel when you learned that your entire family had been brutally murdered?” Give it a rest.

Plenty of time to sing “For She’s a Jolly Good Lift Bridge” and to raise a glass when the time comes. It’s too soon to mourn and too early to blog. Let’s all just enjoy being in shock and denial for a few more days. I know I will.

© 2011 by J. Dennis Robinson, All rights reserved.