Cleveland City Council Okays Demolition of Eagle Avenue Bridge

As to further the merging of the Scranton Peninsula into a slow-growing Downtown neighborhood, City Council approved the demolition of the Eagle Avenue Bridge, which has been out of use for the past two decades.

Linking Scranton Peninsula with the West Bank of the Flats since 1931, the Eagle was the oldest operating lift bridge in the city at one point. Its razing, which City Hall urged was necessary for safety concerns, is scheduled to take place next summer.

“It’s a big deal in the Flats. We’ve taken this proposed demolition really seriously,” James DeRosa, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Capital Projects, told Councilman Kevin Bishop.

The vertical support structures, which DeRosa said are “failing,” would have to be rebuilt. That, he said, would be way costlier than the demo’s $3.2 million price tag. “Essentially we would have to reconstruct the majority of the bridge for it to remain in its current aesthetic.”

The city would cover roughly $750,000 of that demo cost, which would come primarily from road and bridge bonds. About $2.5 million of the bill would be covered by a Municipal Bridge Grant the city received last year from the Ohio Department of Transportation.

A portion of the bridge, probably the rusted bases of its vertical legs, would be kept for an “interpretative park,” DeRosa suggested, which would be built into the cost of the demolition. A bid for such park design would go out in December.

Which seemed to confuse Bishop. “So, I mean, you don’t need much of a design to tear a bridge down, right?” he argued.

“There’s a considerable amount of work that goes into it,” Rick Switalski, a city engineer at MOCAP, told Bishop. “The U.S. Coast Guard [is involved]. Maritime traffic that’s in the channel. The bridge is a threat to that.”

“Part of it is knowing how you’re demolishing the bridge,” DeRosa said, “so that you keep the channel safe.”

The end of Eagle’s position over the Cuyahoga will help usher in Scranton Peninsula’s new era of development.

About a block away from Brewdog, the area’s first new bar in ages, the ridding of an industrial blemish is bound to make the welcoming of the Silverhills at Thunderbird apartment complex more suited to luxury renters when it finishes construction and opens in 2025.

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