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Arch Deluxe Building Bridges By J. Kingston Pierce
What's striking about this indictment is that it came from a distinguished engineer: Conde Balcom McCullough. Between the two world wars, as America's new lust for automobiles provoked a highway-building boom, McCullough designed and supervised construction of hundreds of new bridges, the overwhelming number of them in Oregon. McCullough's philosophy of bridge architecture took account of aesthetics as well as physics. That was most obvious in five graceful structures he erected during the mid-1930s in a major federal-backed effort to complete Oregon's scenic coastal highway (now Highway 101). Nobody who drives that blustery, rugged shore can miss McCullough's masterpieces, perhaps the most awe-inspiring of which is his 3,260-foot Yaquina Bay Bridge at Newport, with a soaring central through-arch and two smaller deck arches that seem to skip over the wide mouth of the Yaquina River like a perfectly thrown pebble. As is true of its surviving sister spans at the towns of Reedsport, Florence, and North Bend, Newport's much-photographed landmark fulfills McCullough's ideal: engineering committed unabashedly in the cause of romance. Born in 1887 and named for a character in a French novel his mother read during her pregnancy, Conde McCullough grew up in the upper Midwest and worked on railroads before settling into the civil engineering program at Iowa State College in Ames. There he was fascinated with stone, brick, and reinforced-concrete arches, a study he extended into his earliest professional employment, in the Des Moines office of James B. Marsh, developer of the "rainbow arch" bridge. McCullough became convinced that reinforced-concrete arch spans were not only more visually arresting than their traditional steel-truss cousins but could be produced at a comparable cost and maintained more economically.
Yet it was McCullough the Romantic who gave his bridges their finishing flourishes. He might add pedestrian observation balconies to a span above a spectacular canyon. Or line a road deck's edge with precast concrete dentils and insist that piers be scored in a waterfall pattern. His frequent use of Art Deco entrance pylons appalled purists, who said he'd succumbed to transient public tastes. But the designer ignored them, intent on pleasing himself first and foremost. He wanted his works to connect with their surroundings and have what he defined as a timeless, rhythmic beauty. McCullough had begun putting his stamp on Oregon's beachside roadways even before the 1930s, most memorably with his Rogue River Bridge, a seven-arched leap of concrete that sits just outside the far-south hamlet of Gold Beach. However, it was in the five coastal bridges he began erecting in 1934, using money supplied partly by the federal government's Works Projects Administration, that McCullough's lofty vision was truly satisfied. Each of them was slightly different, though all used arches as their main element, uniting their profiles with the rolling headlands they connected. His 1,650-foot bridge over the deep Siuslaw River at Florence featured pylons and two reinforced tied arches on either side of a counterbalanced midsection. The Alsea Bay Bridge at Waldport stretched 3,028 feet over the navigable entrance to the Alsea River and consisted of three reinforced-concrete tied arches, while the crossing of the Umpqua River at Reedsport was accomplished with a 2,213-foot arrangement of reinforced-concrete arches flanking a steel-truss tied-arch swing span. After giving his Yaquina Bay Bridge a 600-foot central arch, McCullough seemed to feel the need for some slightly new direction at North Bend, so his 5,337-foot Coos Bay bridge included a 1,700-foot midsection of steel cantilever trusses. Although usually a rather modest sort, McCullough was thrilled with his coastal projects, calling them "jewel-like clasps in perfect settings, linking units of a beautiful highway." Oregon Governor Charles Martin was no less effusive when, in 1936, he mounted a dais in Coos Bay to celebrate the bridges' completion. "I am particularly proud," he added, "that we did not go to New York for men to design these magnificent bridges." Unfortunately, McCullough couldn't be on hand for this ceremony. He was off designing new bridges in Central America. In the six decades since, only one of McCullough's five coastal masterpieces has disappeared: the Alsea Bay Bridge was demolished and replaced in 1991 by a wider, supposedly safer overpass. The rest have become integral to Highway 101—none more so than the Conde Balcom McCullough Memorial Bridge, across Coos Bay, renamed in 1947 in honor of its architect, who had died of a stroke the year before.
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