History
The first bridge on the site was an iron girder bridge built in 1857. Purchased from the British government at the end of the Crimean War, this bridge had a 210 feet (64 m) span with side trusses being solid riveted iron 10 feet (3.0 m) high, designed to prevent Russian snipers from killing British troops. The bridge was dismantled and reconstructed with stone buttresses on the site.
The current bridge was designed by Harold Desbrowe Annear and opened in 1923, having three reinforced concrete arches supported by piled foundations. As originally constructed all three spans crossed the river, but with the construction of the South Eastern Arterial in the 1960s, the river was diverted away from under the northern span, and the four lane road was built there instead. This method of construction reduced the clearance available to traffic on the road underneath, and in the 1990s in conjunction with the CityLink project the arch elements of this span were removed, and replaced by new elements 0.6 m higher at the crown and 1.2 m higher at either end. Specialised monitoring was required during the process to manage the changing loads on the elements of the bridge.
In January 2007 rehabilitation work was carried out by VicRoads, including waterproofing the concrete deck, replacing the tram tracks, and general resurfacing. Stage two commenced in April 2007 and is due for completion in July 2008, and involved replacement of balustrades and new traffic barriers at the kerbs. The first stage of works had required a total road and tramway closure.
The site is listed on the Victorian Heritage Register and is included a Heritage Overlay.
Read more about this topic: Church Street Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)