Late at night on June 15th of 1917 the world's first vehicle crossed the Fremont Bridge. Foot traffic was allowed across the bridge deck the next day and has continued in a steady stream since then, along with horse drawn conveyance, trolleys, bicycles and automobile traffic. For decades trolleys remained the major mode of transportation for people moving about the city. The original Fremont Bridge trolley poles have been restored to the bridge deck, though not in their original placement.
Before straightened into a channel, this site served as a seasonal home to the Duwamish people, who fished and hunted here on marshy banks and were supplanted by settlement. In photographs, as Lake Washington Ship Canal was being built (ca. 1911), the site is revealed as a mud flat, houses and shacks on its banks, weirs controlling the flow of water, and the neighborhoods on either side straggling up the banks and hills. Snapshots of the opening of the canal, on the 4th of July, 1917, show a more orderly landscape with crowds filling the streets and canal banks. This is still the place of nature and people, commerce and leisure, a crossroads of water and steel.
The Fremont Bridge is one of four bascule bridges that span the Lake Washington Ship Canal ('bascule' is French for balance). In addition to replacing the bridge's gears,
recent renovations removed steel X bracing and replaced it with concrete pillars. The bridge has been retrofitted over the years to accommodate transportation and safety needs as times changed, although its essential character, presence and importance in connecting city neighborhoods and the flow of commerce remain as they ever were. From the trails on either side of the canal the viewer may watch the elegant movement of the bridge as it raises and then lowers, something that happens about 35 times a day. As it must have seemed in those first days, its action is majestic, entertaining and a celebratory event.
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