Lane's Folly: the Chesapeake Bay Bridge

It's time to cross the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. Since the thing is 4.3 miles long, it will take a couple posts for Chowder and I to get across it. Which is good, because I found so many beautiful pictures of the bridge that they can't all fit in one post.

For today's post, a little historical perspective. Proposals to build a bridge across the bay go back as far as the 1880s. In 1907 there was a proposal for an electric trolley line to link Baltimore and the Eastern Shore. In 1909 there was an even more ambitious plan for a 235 mile network of trolley lines crisscrossing the bay and connecting the mainland to countless little towns on the other side. No one was willing to put up the $13 million dollars, so that didn't work out. In 1918, the Governor wanted to build a double decker bridge, with freight trains on one level and trolley cars on the other, but again it was just too expensive, so a new ferry service was put in place instead. In the late 1920s, the bridge almost happened - the legislature approved plans for a road bridge across the bay and even appropriated some funds, but then the stock market crashed and we got a Great Depression instead of a bay bridge. They were getting close to reviving the project 10 years later, but World War II got in the way.

Baltimore writer H.L. Mencken thought the idea of a bay bridge was foolish, saying "There is not the slightest reason to believe that any such structure could ever earn enough to pay the interest and amortization on $10,000,000, to say nothing of the heavy costs of maintenance. There is simply not traffic enough between the Eastern and Western Shores, and there is no evidence that there will ever be enough hereafter." Ha. He should see the bridge on a Friday afternoon in July. Some folks on the Eastern Shore weren't too crazy about the idea either, apparently not wanting to be all that closely associated with the rest of Maryland.

Another winner in the Predicting the Future Badly department is this Baltimore Sun editorial from 1947: “It’s a good thing they didn’t build that trolley bridge forty years ago. It would have been out of date and just a piece of junk now. If they wait another forty years before they build this bridge, they won’t need it. Automobiles will be as out of date as trolley cars. People will have flymobiles and won’t need bridges to cross the bay.”

Governor William Preston Lane disagreed, or maybe just didn't want to wait around for flymobiles to be invented, and got a plan approved by Congress to build the bridge in 1948. His critics called it "Lane's Folly" but he got the last laugh when the bridge was eventually named in his memory in 1967. The first span cost 45 million dollars and used 42,500 pounds of steel. It opened in 1952 with a five hour ceremony followed by a motorcade across the new bridge led by the Governor. It was at the time the longest steel structure over water in the world. Traffic far exceeded expectations, and in 1973 a second span was added. Above are pictures of the 1952 span under construction, Governor Lane on the bridge on the eve of its opening, and opening day.