In a city of bridges, this is the only suspension bridge. It was also, for quite some time, the city’s longest. Spanning two continents, it was the longest in the world, connecting Africa and Poland.
The internet has some good information about the Sidaway Bridge.
Before the internet, site/sights like this were unknown even to many of the natives of whatever city I was depicting. I began shooting the Sidaway in the early eighties, and folks would marvel at the suspension bridge ruin overgrown with flora, that, by the early 2000s would become another shot in a dominant mode of domestic documentation, ruins and exploration photography.
This site was, in fact, one of the locations for a feature film, Outside East, that never saw the light of a projector because, well, art and entertainment is what it is. The main character was always meeting people at historic engineering and industrial sites that are now all gone. It was a Rust Belt crime story and the film’s main character, Joseph Stone, would speak his lines, as part of the plot, and were also a running commentary on the landscape itself. In the scene Stone says: “It’s the longest bridge in the world.” Response: “Get outta here.” Stone replies. “It connects Africa with Poland.” Which was a standard, sarcastically correct, harmless, caustic line from the sixties in this town, one I could have easily heard at the Frances Bar, or St. Hyacinth Church a few blocks away. (bar is gone, Catholic Church closes, sold to Baptists) In the trnse 1960s the bridge connected a Polish neighborhood with a solidly black neighorhood that was Hungarian, but back in the 1950s. This side of the bridge had many gritty housing projects. During the Hough riots, a neighborhood miles to the north, the Sidaway was torched, and its wood planking that made up its floor, disintegrated, and the bridge has stood abandoned since 1968.
There’s only one lesson the Sidaway preaches for anyone of experience. All territories are temporary, and, thus, never worth the fight, better to take pictures or write.
Many ruined sites i’ve done thirty years prior to their “discovery” now have become ruins’ standards. I’m sure no one either walked over or saw the bridge before it was closed prior to 1968, or clocked it for the next forty years, so i tried.
