A City of Bridges: Twelve Ways Across the Willamette

Portland is a river city twice over, and the Willamette — the river that splits it into east and west — is crossed downtown by a dozen bridges that read like a catalog of American bridge engineering. There is no better month to take their measure than November, when the lifts run for river traffic against a sky the color of the steel itself.

The senior citizen is the Hawthorne Bridge, opened in 1910 and recognized as the oldest vertical-lift bridge still operating in the United States. Its two towers raise the deck a full hundred feet for ships, a maneuver it performs some 800 times a year — more than any other bridge in the city — while carrying one of the heaviest bicycle commutes of any span in America across its sidewalks.

Upstream, the Tilikum Crossing, opened in 2015, is the bridge that broke the pattern: it carries TriMet buses and the MAX Orange Line, streetcars, cyclists, and pedestrians — everything but private cars — and its cable-stayed silhouette, lit at night in colors that shift with the river's temperature and flow, became the skyline's newest sentence. Downstream, the Steel Bridge does double duty on two decks: trains below, cars and MAX above, its lower lift able to rise independently of the upper — an engineering trick only a handful of bridges in the world can perform.

The practical consequence of a working river is the lift: when the siren sounds and the gates drop, Portland's surface grid pauses for the passage of tugs, barges, and the occasional tall ship. Federal rules restrict lifts during rush hours, but midday drivers plan around them the way they plan around weather — because here, they are weather.

Count the bridges on a clear November morning from the east bank esplanade — Burnside's towers, Broadway's rust-red trusses, the Fremont Bridge's great arch standing over all of them. Other cities have a riverfront. Portland has a working machine for crossing one, assembled over a century, still running on time.