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{Sounds near the river}
In the early 1900's, Chautauqua's, they became very popular and they were
traveling informational shows. A way for the community to spend a couple of
weeks learning about what's going on around the world and.. and most of the
wealthy people lived over here on the other side of the bridge and they like to attend
the Chautauqua's. They could literally see the fairgrounds from their homes,
but it was quite a trip to get over there.
And people had a long walk to go around to get to that. So, actually, some of the principles
in the Hart-Parr Tractor factory, at their expense, they got their engineer out,
they design this pedestrian bridge and put it up in just a matter of days.
It was a cable bridge and it had planks and you hung on and you walked across
and you went back and forth. A lot of people wouldn't use it.
Way back when, it didn't even have a handrail. It was a 4-foot wide, wooden
plank bridge that was suspended on metal cables.
It wasn't a transportation bridge; it was a walking bridge and it
culturally tied the community together to the Chatauqua's; to sporting events;
activities, family activities, you know, we built ourselves around a
great quality of life.
Charles City, the Cedar River runs directly through the middle of it.
It's not like, you know, the city's on, er, the river's on the outskirts, so we're a
divided town, half on one side of the river, half on the other. So bridges
are what tie the community together.
{sound of a police scanner}
I remember the night, I had a scanner on, I was listening to everything that was going
on with the flood and I heard them say it from the police department,
"she went in the river, it just went down".
And I couldn't figure out what they were talking about and I looked down here at
the Main Street bridge and I thought, boy, did that bridge get washed out.
It never crossed, it never crossed my mind that we would lose the original bridge.
It was something that only Charles City had and now it was gone.
People were shocked and one of the things that ah, you know, they, I guess was critical
to them, is they wanted us to recover the old bridge and to see if
we could get it back up. When we couldn't get the same old bridge,
they wanted something just exactly like it put back up.
One of the things that happens after a disaster is uncertainly and that's really,
really the worst thing, is that not knowing is worse, you know, bad news
is even better than no news. So the Mayor got out; explained what had happened;
what steps we were trying to take. He tried to, to get input from the people
and let them share what their feelings were and what they wanted.
The town hall meetings were the Mayor's idea and I think, ah, they were brilliant.
I wanted to preserve the basic direction the community wanted us to go,
regarding the bridge. It took a while to make everybody understand
that we needed to follow a fairly ambitious timeline in terms of getting
the bridge rebuilt or we ran the risk of not being able to work with
the people who were responding to the flood.
We had hired the engineers; we knew that we weren't going to have
the old bridge back. That was still hard for a lot of people to accept.
The engineers picked up on that and they came back with a lot of designs
that had facades that looked like the old bridge.
It was at that point that the aesthetics committee was able to move
forward with all the questions then, about what would the piers look like,
all the detail of the bridge.
We had a firm with local ties located in Iowa, Musco Lighting who came in.
came in. They offered, right from the beginning, that they were going to provide
all of the lighting for the bridge. It elevated it almost immediately to near icon status.
{sounds of lapping water against the river bank}
It is the trail, I mean it connects the trail. Without the bridge, we went 2 years
and we couldn't really use the trail system that we had in town, because this was
the link connecting the trail on that side of the river to this side of the river.
Now with it and the river front and the new park we're, we're starting to tie
the whole river front together. Which is something we didn't have before,
so it's, it's sort of become its own piece in our history,
rather than just a recreation of the past.
FEMA's role in this thing has been, ah, has been very critical, I mean, I don't know
how we would have put this bridge back without the help we got from FEMA.
I also have to commend the state of Iowa because they step forward and ah,
they not only picked up the state, but they also picked up the local portion.
You know, I think the simple fact is that Charles City could have never replaced
the bridge without the FEMA program. For a community of 7500 people, ah,
we would have had a very difficult time recovering. It's unlikely that we would
have built the bridge. Certainly it wouldn't be there now. It changed
it from having lost the past, to us being involved in creating a future.
This bridge gets used a lot, you know, it might actually get used a little more
because it's accessible to everyone now. There was a segment of people who
couldn't get across that old bridge and now they get a change to use this bridge.
The community loves the new bridge. You know, they miss the old bridge
but the new bridge has been well received.
I mean, that, if you look at that thing, I mean it's gorgeous. At night
it's beautiful and, um, it's not the old girl but it's still a, it's still a
damn good bridge we got now.
{sounds of lapping water against the river bank}