1946 B&O Ore Bridge Demo Revisited

Courtesy Cleveland Memory Project

Since my last few posts have been about the ore bridges at U. S. Steel, I thought I might as well post a few articles that I recently found about the 1946 demolition of the ore bridge at the mouth of the Black River. That’s the bridge above in the vintage photograph circa 1936.

And here’s one of the articles, which appeared in the Lorain Journal on December 20, 1946. It tells how the demolition people were having trouble taking it down.

Strangely enough, while preparing this post, I made an embarassing discovery: I already did a post on the B&O ore bridge demo back in 2015 (here)! With the same article! Sorry about that, Chief.

Nevertheless, I found a couple new things about that demolition that you might find interesting.

The best one is the story about the demolition that ran in the “Log of Lorain,” which was a sort of gossip column that ran in the Journal in the 40s and 50s. Here’s the column (below), which appeared in the paper on December 20, 1946. It tells the story of an unfortunate sparrow that apparently got a little too close to the structure when the dynamite went off. The column also includes a mention of fighter Johnny Risko’s birthday party.

Lastly, here’s an article that ran in the Journal on December 27, 1946. The ore bridge was finally all the way down on the ground, but not without a near disaster.