UMass Magazine Online

Winter 2003

Departments

Around the Pond

Features

All my best friends are here

One giant molecule

I learnt to dream of Sicily

The Landscape Beautiful

Around the Pond

bridges of umass




	CONNECTING: Mike Robertson ’04, foreground, and David Camacho ’03 work on bridging the campus. (photo by Ben Barnhart)

ANYTIME I'M DRIVING and see a ‘Bridge Closed’ sign, I get out and look. Is this one we want?” asks Professor Alan Lutenegger, head of the civil and environmental engineering department. Lutenegger is collecting turn-of-the-century bridges to restore and use for pedestrians on the UMass Amherst campus.

The bridges he wants are mostly of iron and steel “pony truss” construction, meaning they have no top members connecting the sides. They’re small bridges, less than 80 feet long.

“We’re in the throes of repairing the first bridge,” he says, which he hopes will be ready to use by spring or early summer of 2003. Lutenegger got it from the Vermont Department of Transportation after he’d asked engineering alum David Scott ’89, “You don’t happen to have a bridge, do you?”

The great thing, says Lutenegger, is that they’re rescuing historic artifacts, and that they’re not using any state money. “It’s all been donations from alums – money, services, materials.” And students provide volunteer labor as they learn how the old bridges were constructed.

Over the next five years Lutenegger hopes to install some of the reconstructed beauties in different places around the campus. “We’re working now with the grounds and space-planning people, historical commissions, waiting for approval.” Possible spots include a site near the Campus Pond, a low spot near Sylvan dorm and a location near the College of Engineering, between Marston and Knowles. Some of the bridges will be purely ornamental, some functional, but none will connect buildings or go over highways.

Eventually Lutenegger hopes to create a walking tour so that visitors to campus can learn about historic bridges and “we can introduce engineering to kids.”

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bridges of umass

BRIDGES: Larger image