It’s gone.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge is gone.
My brain is slowly beginning to wrap itself around that cold, hard fact but my heart is having difficulty following suit.
The catastrophic collapse of the structure made national and international news. It will fade from the headlines about as quickly as it made them, but we will deal with multiple levels of the aftermath for years to come.
That’s what happens with most disasters. The world offers its thoughts and prayers, fills some airtime with dramatic words and graphic images and perhaps even organizes a fundraiser or two. And then it moves on to the next disaster, the next catastrophe.
For those much closer to Ground Zero, it’s more complicated. In the case of the bridge collapse, several families lost loved ones. Individuals have and will continue to lose their jobs; other individuals will add significant time to their commuter trips; businesses will suffer; and one of the state’s most significant economic drivers — the Port of Baltimore — will lose hundreds of millions of dollars. Price hikes because of supply chain interruptions will again rear their ugly heads and consumers everywhere will suffer the consequences.
All of these elements are important, of course. But I’m not here to talk about those. I’ll leave those issues to the grief counselors, economists, engineers and the like.
I’m here to write from the heart, as a born and reared Eastsider.
The Key bridge was ours. We watched it being built. It was as if we collectively nurtured a pregnancy with an exceptionally long gestation period and in March 1977, we celebrated its birth with gusto.
I was a student at Catonsville Community College when the bridge finally opened to great fanfare. College friend Pat Goucher and I scraped together a few bucks to put some gas in my trusty Honda Civic and have 50 cents left to pay the toll. With great abandon, we took a frivolous trip around the beltway so we could say we crossed the bridge the day it opened.
With its completion, the bridge finally connected Southeast Baltimore County with the rest of the world. While it literally completed and closed the circle of the Baltimore Beltway, connecting Sollers Point and Hawkins Point, it metaphorically completed us. That bridge, that inanimate hunk of steel and concrete, made us whole, included us, made us part of, acknowledged our existence and importance.
Overnight, friends and family members who lived just a couple beltway exits apart could visit each other in 15 minutes instead of an hour. Workers shaved considerable time off their daily commutes. And, in addition to being a sturdy, functional piece of infrastructure, it was architecturally a gorgeous piece of art. It struck a stunning profile on the skyline and immediately became a beloved landmark.
The bridge was ours. In traveling the bridge in our daily commute, we forged relationships with friendly toll-takers. We deliberately drove to specific toll booth lanes so we could chat with our favorite workers for a few seconds; a few seconds longer if no one was behind us.
In my travels as a journalist, I was privileged to be escorted by MdTA employees to a pier beneath the bridge where I was allowed to photograph the arrival of the port’s first batch of super-sized cranes. The ship carrying the cranes, in an amazingly engineered piece of marine choreography, passed under the span with inches to spare.
Over the past two days, as many people turned to social media to discuss the collapse, a common theme surfaced: “When we saw the bridge, we knew we were home.”
The bridge was ours. Whether weary travelers had crossed the country or simply visited the Eastern Shore, spotting the bridge on the horizon brought a sense of relief that the journey was almost over. Home again.
Over its nearly 50 years of community service, the span was like family. Many area residents have a genealogical connection to the bridge, having family members who helped design and build it or manufactured the products used to construct it. Still others had family members who maintained or repaired the structure, whether they climbed to dangerous heights to replace lightbulbs or stayed at deck level to fill potholes or scrape rust and then repaint.
Nick Triantafilos, whose family owns venerable Dundalk restaurant Costas Inn and therefore knows a thing or two about the importance of area landmarks and institutions, eloquently expressed his feelings in a social media post.
“The Francis Scott Key Bridge was a part of all of us … our being … our history,” he wrote on Facebook. “A gateway to our past, where our dads and grandfathers forged the steel from the behemoth that was once Bethlehem Steel at Sparrows Point. The days when we were an industrial juggernaut and the backbone of the country’s steel industry. Now she’s all gone, and with it the connections to the people who provided the hard labor and took great pride in building that beautiful bridge.”
The bridge was ours. I likened its sturdy, dependable presence to that of the favorite, fun uncle who was always there for us.
That “uncle” was a textbook example of gorgeous architecture, utilitarian infrastructure and, perhaps most importantly, an inanimate object that told a community it mattered, all at the same time. A steel and concrete embodiment of art, function and heart.
I can only hope that community isn’t left dangling any longer than necessary and that a new span is built as quickly as politics, economics and safety will allow.
Dundalk deserves no less.
Because the bridge was ours.
