A Book of Walks by Bruce Bochy

Author:Bruce Bochy [Bochy, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780986189838
Publisher: Wellstone Books

CHAPTER 5

WALKING FROM OHIO TO KENTUCKY AND BACK, OVER A HISTORIC SUSPENSION BRIDGE

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I love walking near water. Any city that has a river flowing through it probably has some good spots for walking, none better than a scenic bridge with a view up and down the river and right down into the current, if you want to peer over the edge. For me one of the highlights of coming to Cincinnati for a series against the Reds has always been the vantage point looking out over the Ohio River. For years the Reds played in Riverfront Stadium, going all the way back to 1970, and then in 1996 they renamed it Cinergy Field. Finally in 2001 they opened a new ballyard, the Great American Ball Park. It doesn’t matter much to me. Whatever they call their park, it’s right there on the Ohio River practically spitting distance from the Roebling Suspension Bridge, which was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it was built in the 1850s and 1860s. Cincinnati’s cool because you can walk across the bridge into Kentucky, walk around over on the other side, and then walk back across the Ohio River on the bridge and cross the state line again.

The first thing you notice walking out of the ballpark toward the Roebling Bridge is the sheer size of the massive towers at each end. They needed to be massive, to anchor each end of the suspension bridge, and massive they are, constructed out of a combination of oak beams and a monumental assemblage of limestone and sandstone. Every time I walk that way I have to kind of stare up at the tower on the Ohio side, struck once again by how huge it is. The designer of the bridge, an engineer named John Roebling, wanted to make sure the towers were more than massive enough to support as much weight as necessary as horses and people crossed over the bridge, so the towers were intentionally built to be oversized.

I got kind of interested in the designer, Roebling, as I walked across the bridge and read a plaque there that tells you a little about him. He started work on the bridge in 1856, but construction was interrupted during the years of the Civil War, starting in 1861, and it didn’t open until 1866. Roebling was from Germany, which is where Kim’s father’s family comes from. Later on I heard that Roebling studied bridge design in Berlin and also studied with Hegel, the philosopher, but decided to come to the New World to seek his fortune. Roebling started producing his own high-quality wire rope, which he used for the suspension bridges he built, and after he finished in Ohio, he soon went to work on his master project, the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. He designed that famous span, but died during the construction, following a freak accident, but his son oversaw its completion.

When I look

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