Bridge Tender
Bridge Tender Soundex Code B632
Bridge tenders were targets of city's contempt
Perhaps unfairly, workers gained reputation for being arrogant, lazy
Thursday, July 28, 2011,
By Stephan Benzkofer, Chicago Tribune
They were scorned, hated and reviled. They were called despots and tyrants. They were lazy. On their good days, they needlessly made the public wait; on the bad, they endangered the public safety.
They were bridge-tenders, and it is hard to overstate the contempt Chicagoans in the late 1800s and early 1900s felt toward the men who operated the spans across the Chicago River.
That may be difficult to understand now, when the bridges and the river are a tourist attraction, and the relatively rare sight of a bridge going up is a reason to whip out a camera, not resort to curses.
But it wasn't always that way. The city straddles a river and getting across that river in the late 1800s was a difficult task. There were fewer bridges, so workers and commercial traffic were funneled into congested choke points. The bridges weren't reliable; the spans frequently closed to allow river traffic to pass as the landlubbers waited. It wasn't uncommon for traffic jams to back up for blocks. The real poke in the eye, though, came when the bridge stayed open for no good reason or lazily swung closed.
City law in 1872 prohibited the bridges from remaining open longer than 10 minutes during the morning, noon, and evening rush hours, but the "rule is shamefully disregarded," the Tribune reported. "It is a notorious fact that the bridge tenders, with one or two exceptions, are the laziest men in the employ of the city."
Outraged citizens couldn't do much about it. This was Chicago, and the bridge tender wasn't just any laborer off the street. He knew somebody — the alderman or the mayor or a mayor's supporter. The appointed job became a lucrative way for politicians to reward friends and supporters. In 1878, a bridge tender could make about $1,200 a year. By 1901, the Tribune reported that four were paid a whopping $3,400 annually and 14 others took home $2,700. Many official bridge tenders farmed out the actual labor and pocketed a profit.
But just as there are two halves to Chicago's famous Bascule bridges, there are two sides to the bridge tenders' story. There were conscientious men — probably more than the one or two exceptions the Tribune mentioned — who did try to balance a difficult, lonely job where pleasing one group meant angering the other. In 1908, the job became covered under the civil service law, lessening the rampant patronage abuse, though not ending it. As the century progressed, so did the professionalism of the bridge tenders.
An unwritten, grisly part of the job was suicide watch. Veteran bridge tenders became adept at spotting people at risk. They looked for pedestrians who lingered or stared too long into the river. A 30-year veteran named Frank Ward said in 1945, "It's either love, liquor or finances that cause people to want to jump into the river. Most of our work is talking them out of it, rather than the actual saving of lives."
sbenzkofer@tribune.com
Editor's note: Many thanks to Tribune reader Jim Phillips, of Chicago, who suggested the idea for this story. Phillips writes about the subject at his website, chicagoloopbridges.com
