Take a tour
of bridge for
unique view

"What's Left"
By JOE YACHANIN

I just wanted to say thanks to Cuyahoga County Engineer Robert Klaiber Jr.

I don't know if the subway tours on the Detroit-Superior bridge were actually his idea or not, but I'm sure he had to OK them at some point.

What a really cool way to spend a Saturday morning and get a unique vantage point on the city. My friend and I checked it out during the June 30 tour. We were lucky to have her mom along with us, because she remembered actually riding the streetcars downtown from the West Side, and told us all about what it was like.

There is one more tour scheduled for this summer. It runs from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Sept. 1.

You can enter the self-guided tour from either side of the bridge, but it seemed like most people were coming in from the Superior Viaduct near the Engineer's Office off West 25th Street like we did. The other entrance is above the RTA Waterfront Line stop halfway down the hill from the Warehouse District.

Once you go in, you can walk a little farther under the road to the west and see where there is a subway style entrance that leads up to the old Cleveland Trust building at the corner of Detroit and West 25th. There were also some information tables set up with old photographs of the streetcars and the bridge, and an area with a projection screen and chairs where they were showing a documentary on Cleveland's streetcar lines.

Portions of the streetcar tracks still exist under the bridge and you have to be careful as you walk across the uneven ground toward the actual span of the bridge. There are also a lot of the original subway tiles still lining the walls, which I thought was pretty neat. We also noticed some strange looking calcium or lime deposits coming down from the ceiling like little white stalactites.

When you get out to the actual section of the bridge that goes over the river, the footing changes to see-through metal grates on either side of a plywood path so you can see through the bottom of the bridge all the way down to the water. My friend and her mom found this a little unnerving, and I might not recommend it for anyone who is afraid of heights. I was really hoping to see a big freighter navigating it's way down the river from above, but I was satisfied with a couple of small pleasure boats.

You can't really get near the outer edges of the bridge except for a couple of lookout points the Engineer's Office has set up with telescopes. You can go off the main path to a reinforced area near the edge and climb up a little step ladder to look through the scope at the buildings near the bridge. A very nice touch.

When we got to the other side there were some more historic displays and we came out on the hill above the Waterfront Line stop. I don't remember if it was West Superior or West 10th Street technically. But where we came out you could still see the stone formation in the hill where the Superior Viaduct once connected with downtown and the footprints of where some of the bridge supports had been. The date when the viaduct had been "toasted" was posted on the stone. Looking back up at the Detroit-Superior bridge from that area you could also see where they marked the pouring of the bridge's concrete.

To get a different point of view we decided to walk back to the west end of the bridge from the top deck on the regular sidewalk. You can see pretty far from up there and we were able to spot the last remnants of the sailboat race that had been earlier that morning out on the lake.

Since the tours are self-guided, there's no one hurrying you along or shouting historical tidbits over the sound of traffic from the upper deck. You can linger on the bridge as long as you want, imagining (or remembering) a bygone era. And the best part is that the whole deal, including the parking, is totally free.