Cleveland’s Sidaway Bridge

Image from Google Street View

Image from the Historic American

Engineering Record (HAER)

With all the talk about the Cleveland’s Innerbelt Bridge, I thought it was a good time to talk about a bridge in Cleveland that most don’t know about or have never seen. It’s the Sidaway Bridge , Cleveland’s only suspension-style bridge, built in 1931, at 680 feet long. The bridge was designed by Wilbur J. Watson and Associates, Consulting Engineers. It is a pedestrian footbridge, spanning a ravine known as Kingsbury Run, connecting Sidaway Avenue to Kinsman Road, near East 65th Street. (On a side note, Kingsbury Run was also the scene of the area’s infamous, gruesome, and unsolved ”Torso” murders from the 1930s, but I’ll think I’ll pass on that topic. )

The neighborhoods the bridge connected were Slavic Village and the Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority’s Garden Valley estates. During the mid-sixties, at a time when racial tensions were running very high in the Cleveland area, someone set fire to the wooden deck, and some planks from the southern end of the bridge were removed.

As the wooden deck is missing, the bridge is no longer used. It is a graceful looking structure, and maybe it can stand long enough for someone to restore it and put it to good use.

Photo HAER

Here is a short video – a little shaky – that someone took of the bridge in December of 2007.




Check out my blog home page for the latest Cleveland information,
here.