CROWN POINT, N.Y. — The opening of a new bridge reconnecting this town to the outside world ahead of schedule will, as an official said at the ribbon cutting, “restore normalcy” to this isolated region on the New York-Vermont border.
But for people who live here at the southern end of Lake Champlain, far from major highways and centers of government, the new span represents not just an economic lifeline, but a triumph over stubborn bureaucracy.
“When you see everything you’ve worked for jeopardized, you can get mad,” said Lorraine Franklin, 54, one of several business owners credited with starting a grassroots movement that pressured state agencies to rebuild the bridge far sooner than anticipated.
Although initial estimates projected eight years for the replacement’s completion, the new Lake Champlain Bridge had the first cars roll over it earlier this month, just more than two years after deep cracks were found in the original bridge, forcing its immediate closure and demolition.
“We had nothing to lose. By losing the bridge, we were going to lose everything anyway,” said Franklin, owner of the West Addison, Vt., General Store and other businesses near the bridge, and co-chairwoman of the Lake Champlain Bridge Coalition.
The original Champlain Bridge, which connected New York to Vermont over the enormous lake’s southern tail, was in obvious distress by 2009. The steel truss structure, built for about $1 million and opened with public fanfare in 1929, had become pitted with rust. The lake was visible through the crumbling roadway.
Despite concerns, New York transportation officials at a public meeting in early October 2009 said the decrepit span was safe following a lengthy repair project, and the partial closure of the roadway that had begun in July was to be lifted.
But then an underwater inspection revealed rapid expansion in cracks in the bridge’s cement piers. On Oct. 16, 2009, officials announced the bridge was in danger of a “catastrophic” collapse and hours later indefinitely halted all car and foot traffic.
Within weeks, the bridge was deemed damaged beyond repair. Three days after Christmas, clusters of locals and officials gathered in a snow squall to watch the bridge being blasted with explosives and crumbling into the lake.
With transportation officials saying a new bridge might not be ready until 2017, many predicted an economic decline in working-class New York towns like Crown Point and Port Henry, and in Vermont’s Addison County, where many depended on tourists crossing the bridge for lake fishing, fall foliage and ski resort trips.
At 490 square miles, the lake is one of the country’s largest, and the effect of the closure was felt immediately on both sides. Parking lots emptied at a string of lakeside mom-and-pop motels and campgrounds on the main route from Interstate 87 in New York. The Bridge Restaurant at the Vermont end of the span was re-dubbed the No Bridge Restaurant and temporarily closed. Within months, the Crown Point Discount Grocery was permanently shuttered.
In a one-two punch, hundreds of commuters who used the bridge every day, most heading to small factories around Middlebury and Vergennes in Vermont, were forced to drive 40 miles north to a ferry crossing or take an even longer trip south around the lake. The area’s sole full-service hospital lay on the Vermont side.
At public meetings on both sides of the bridge, farmers and business owners lambasted officials who suggested a new bridge might have to be built elsewhere and admitted few plans were in place for commuters.
“Without a bridge we’d become a ghost corridor,” said Karen Hennessey, 59, of Crown Point and co-chairwoman of the Lake Champlain Bridge Coalition.
On a bus ride home from a rally at the Albany statehouse, Hennessey, Franklin and others formed the group to maintain pressure on state officials and contractors and keep information flowing. A Facebook page became a public forum for the project, which state and federal agencies quickly fast-tracked. The group even penned “rules of engagement” to help focus its message and successfully lobbied for free 24-hour ferry service, which launched near the project site in February 2010 and helped cut commute times.
Hennessey, who runs a bed-and-breakfast in a 19th-century Crown Point farmhouse, said people felt betrayed by those in charge of maintaining the bridge. The anger galvanized small towners unaccustomed to civic involvement and emotional speeches in front of officials she called “the suits.”
“The North Country is known for not trusting Albany, and New York City might as well be a different universe,” Hennessey said. In early meetings with transportation officials, “It was like they were surprised so many people were affected. We got a lot of blank stares.”
The network got a boost from Robin Knapp of Crown Point, a farmer and retired phone company worker with an interest in photography. Over the course of the demolition and construction, Knapp spent hundreds of hours in and around the site, documenting each stage of construction.
Once posted online, the photos became a kind of ad hoc education course in bridge engineering, as well as a chance to spread rumors — a few true, many false — about delays and construction mistakes.
“Oh it drove them crazy, sure,” Knapp said. “Everybody was watching. The bosses were really getting it from their bosses.”
Knapp’s 7,000 or so photos also helped the community understand the dangers and hardships of the project, he said. To meet an aggressive construction schedule, crews worked above the lake through the brutally cold winters — a move state officials described as nearly unheard of in the region.
Franklin recalled an early meeting with Department of Transportation officials after workers driving supports into the lake bed damaged custom-built bridge components, triggering weeks of delay. While engineers attributed the problem to “unidentified” debris in lake mud, the real culprit was pieces of the old bridge missed by the salvage effort. “They couldn’t tell me it was unidentified because they were dumping the pieces in my manure pond right out there,” she said.
New York state Assemblywoman Teresa Sayward said such public scrutiny “absolutely” spurred governors in both states to quickly declare the bridge region a state of emergency, shrinking typical multiyear permitting and design phases to several weeks and helping to keep the project on schedule.
New York Department of Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald, appointed in January, said the agency committed early to a two-year completion and kept lines of communication open. She downplayed the role played by public pressure in the adoption of the accelerated schedule, but credited cross-lake collaboration with helping the department deliver. Federal transportation officials were already learning from the project's speedy success, she said. “It’s not only going to be a model in New York state, but it will be a national model for federal highways,” she said.
But for people who live here at the southern end of Lake Champlain, far from major highways and centers of government, the new span represents not just an economic lifeline, but a triumph over stubborn bureaucracy.
“When you see everything you’ve worked for jeopardized, you can get mad,” said Lorraine Franklin, 54, one of several business owners credited with starting a grassroots movement that pressured state agencies to rebuild the bridge far sooner than anticipated.
Although initial estimates projected eight years for the replacement’s completion, the new Lake Champlain Bridge had the first cars roll over it earlier this month, just more than two years after deep cracks were found in the original bridge, forcing its immediate closure and demolition.
“We had nothing to lose. By losing the bridge, we were going to lose everything anyway,” said Franklin, owner of the West Addison, Vt., General Store and other businesses near the bridge, and co-chairwoman of the Lake Champlain Bridge Coalition.
The original Champlain Bridge, which connected New York to Vermont over the enormous lake’s southern tail, was in obvious distress by 2009. The steel truss structure, built for about $1 million and opened with public fanfare in 1929, had become pitted with rust. The lake was visible through the crumbling roadway.
Despite concerns, New York transportation officials at a public meeting in early October 2009 said the decrepit span was safe following a lengthy repair project, and the partial closure of the roadway that had begun in July was to be lifted.
But then an underwater inspection revealed rapid expansion in cracks in the bridge’s cement piers. On Oct. 16, 2009, officials announced the bridge was in danger of a “catastrophic” collapse and hours later indefinitely halted all car and foot traffic.
Within weeks, the bridge was deemed damaged beyond repair. Three days after Christmas, clusters of locals and officials gathered in a snow squall to watch the bridge being blasted with explosives and crumbling into the lake.
With transportation officials saying a new bridge might not be ready until 2017, many predicted an economic decline in working-class New York towns like Crown Point and Port Henry, and in Vermont’s Addison County, where many depended on tourists crossing the bridge for lake fishing, fall foliage and ski resort trips.
At 490 square miles, the lake is one of the country’s largest, and the effect of the closure was felt immediately on both sides. Parking lots emptied at a string of lakeside mom-and-pop motels and campgrounds on the main route from Interstate 87 in New York. The Bridge Restaurant at the Vermont end of the span was re-dubbed the No Bridge Restaurant and temporarily closed. Within months, the Crown Point Discount Grocery was permanently shuttered.
In a one-two punch, hundreds of commuters who used the bridge every day, most heading to small factories around Middlebury and Vergennes in Vermont, were forced to drive 40 miles north to a ferry crossing or take an even longer trip south around the lake. The area’s sole full-service hospital lay on the Vermont side.
At public meetings on both sides of the bridge, farmers and business owners lambasted officials who suggested a new bridge might have to be built elsewhere and admitted few plans were in place for commuters.
“Without a bridge we’d become a ghost corridor,” said Karen Hennessey, 59, of Crown Point and co-chairwoman of the Lake Champlain Bridge Coalition.
On a bus ride home from a rally at the Albany statehouse, Hennessey, Franklin and others formed the group to maintain pressure on state officials and contractors and keep information flowing. A Facebook page became a public forum for the project, which state and federal agencies quickly fast-tracked. The group even penned “rules of engagement” to help focus its message and successfully lobbied for free 24-hour ferry service, which launched near the project site in February 2010 and helped cut commute times.
Hennessey, who runs a bed-and-breakfast in a 19th-century Crown Point farmhouse, said people felt betrayed by those in charge of maintaining the bridge. The anger galvanized small towners unaccustomed to civic involvement and emotional speeches in front of officials she called “the suits.”
“The North Country is known for not trusting Albany, and New York City might as well be a different universe,” Hennessey said. In early meetings with transportation officials, “It was like they were surprised so many people were affected. We got a lot of blank stares.”
The network got a boost from Robin Knapp of Crown Point, a farmer and retired phone company worker with an interest in photography. Over the course of the demolition and construction, Knapp spent hundreds of hours in and around the site, documenting each stage of construction.
Once posted online, the photos became a kind of ad hoc education course in bridge engineering, as well as a chance to spread rumors — a few true, many false — about delays and construction mistakes.
“Oh it drove them crazy, sure,” Knapp said. “Everybody was watching. The bosses were really getting it from their bosses.”
Knapp’s 7,000 or so photos also helped the community understand the dangers and hardships of the project, he said. To meet an aggressive construction schedule, crews worked above the lake through the brutally cold winters — a move state officials described as nearly unheard of in the region.
Franklin recalled an early meeting with Department of Transportation officials after workers driving supports into the lake bed damaged custom-built bridge components, triggering weeks of delay. While engineers attributed the problem to “unidentified” debris in lake mud, the real culprit was pieces of the old bridge missed by the salvage effort. “They couldn’t tell me it was unidentified because they were dumping the pieces in my manure pond right out there,” she said.
New York state Assemblywoman Teresa Sayward said such public scrutiny “absolutely” spurred governors in both states to quickly declare the bridge region a state of emergency, shrinking typical multiyear permitting and design phases to several weeks and helping to keep the project on schedule.
New York Department of Transportation Commissioner Joan McDonald, appointed in January, said the agency committed early to a two-year completion and kept lines of communication open. She downplayed the role played by public pressure in the adoption of the accelerated schedule, but credited cross-lake collaboration with helping the department deliver. Federal transportation officials were already learning from the project's speedy success, she said. “It’s not only going to be a model in New York state, but it will be a national model for federal highways,” she said.
