The Penobscot Narrows Bridge and Observatory, Prospect, Maine.
Maine Department of Transportation
(page 1 of 2)
A peculiar, but familiar mania overcame me at the Penobscot Narrows Bridge in Prospect. It strikes every time I see Katahdin and once it gripped me so strongly on the cliffs of Cornwall, England, that I took virtually the same photo about 100 times. But the new bridge is the only man-made object in Maine that’s so stunning you couldn’t capture its impact in 1,000 photos.
Opened in May 2007, the bridge already has won many awards and been listed in a registry of the top 25 bridges in the United States. More than 70,000 people visited it last year and many writers have weighed in on its attractions.
So you may already know it has a 420-foot observatory with a 100-mile view on a clear day. It’s not the tallest bridge observatory in the world, just the tallest publicly accessible bridge observatory. The observation deck on the Rama VIII Bridge in Bangkok is 525 feet tall, but not open to the public. The facts about the bridge are endless, but still hypnotic. My favorite is “the total bridge weight is about 10,500 African elephants (roughly 126 million pounds).”
The Penobscot Narrows Bridge is far more than just a pretty picture. It’s also being woven into Maine life. You can see that clearly if you search the Maine Newsstand database (http://libraries.maine.edu/mainedatabases), which stores daily newspaper stories. There already are many entries, even though it took time to settle on that name. Other candidates were the Down East Gateway Bridge, Fort Knox Bridge and Master Sgt. Gary Ivan Gordon Bridge, for the Medal of Honor winner who died in 1993 while protecting the crew of a downed Black Hawk helicopter in Somalia.
The majority of stories were from the Bangor Daily News, including a classic of the little-did-he-know genre. In 2001, a legislative panel voted down a bill to build a new bridge and even the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Donald Berry, R-Belmont, said he was “confident the state Department of Transportation's $25 million rehabilitation of the 70-year-old suspension bridge will remedy some of the structure's problems.”
Posted on Monday, July 14, 2008 in Permalink
