• 14850 Online main page

Ithaca, 29 April 04 -- Ithaca's historic "Downstream Bridge," crossing Fall Creek in the midst of the Forest Home community, will be closed briefly on Saturday afternoon, May 1st, as area residents celebrate the bridge's centennial. The bridge will be closed from noon until a ribbon-cutting ceremony at 3:00pm.

Forest Home, at the spot where Fall Creek turns from a calm brook into a rushing, gorge-bound torrent, was a small mill town until the early 1900s, from the time Joseph Sidney built a wooden dam and the first mill in 1794. The first, wooden bridge, built about 1799, crossed at roughly the same spot as the modern-day bridge. The Groton Bridge Company was contracted to build the current bridge using a Warren Pony Truss design; the pedestrian walkway was added in 1926.

Area residents have resisted any attempts to widen this one-lane bridge, or the Upstream Bridge a short distance away, near the Cornell Plantations, preferring to keep traffic as light as possible. The Downstream Bridge nevertheless carries a steady stream of traffic in both directions, with drivers taking turns, typically in batches of three to five cars, somehow instinctively understanding how it works. The state replaced twenty-year-old I-beams with concrete beams in 1996.

Area residents will serve cake on the bridge from 12:30 to 1:30 on Saturday afternoon.