Torrence Avenue over Grand Calumet River

Bird's Eye Veiw

(Bridge Hunter, Historic Bridges, Satellite)

I learned in a Facebook posting, that this 1938 bridge was blown up March 3, 2016 so that it can be replaced.

Screenshot of a video

You have to wait almost a half-minute for the boom in this video, but the camera was upwind and you can see that the truss remained relatively intact.

(Update: another video of the "boom.")

I think it is ironic that the Grand Calumet River is so much smaller than the Little Calumet River. Obviously, they did a lot of dredging of the Little Calumet River as part of the 9-foot navigation channel project. It is probably more accurate to say they dug a canal that happened to follow the path of the Little Calumet River. (Update: the Grand Calumet River is a remnant of the Konomick River, which was the river in this area before mankind started filling swamps and digging channels.

I feel sorry for the people that use Torrence Avenue to commute to the Ford Plant. The road was severed for about two years by the CREATE GS13 project, Now this bridge was closed May, 2015 and its $13 million replacement is not expected to be done until summer 2017. (DAinfo)

Bird's Eye View

Roger Deschner's comment on the Bridge Hunter page linked above indicates that if IDOT was willing to maintain truss bridges, a $13M expenditure and the inconvenience of an outage lasting more than two years could have been avoided:

A practically identical Pennsylvania truss bridge over the Cal Sag at Archer Avenue is in much better condition, despite carrying heavier traffic including more trucks, and in fact was just repainted.

Rod Sellers posted
Where am I?

Rod commented on his post
Junction of the Calumet and Grand Calumet Rivers. The boat was to prevent boaters from entering the Grand Calumet River which was not navigable in that area. The Torrence Avenue Bridge over the Grand Calumet River (at 138th Street) was demolished and replaced a few years ago. Attached photo shows aerial view from other side of the bridge.

I save the satellite image I accessed in May 2020 because I was surprised that it is over four years old. Google Maps is generally more current than that in an urban area. The Street View does show the new UCEB (Bridge Hunter: Ugly Concrete Eyesore Bridge).

Satellite