Portage Lake Lift Bridge

The bridge connecting Houghton and Hancock across Portage Lake is an engineering landmark, and not just locally. When it opened in nineteen fifty-nine, it was the heaviest double-decked vertical-lift span in the world, built with more than thirty-five thousand tons of concrete and seven thousand tons of steel. What made it unusual then and now is its intermediate lift position: the bridge can raise just its lower deck to street level, allowing smaller boats to pass with thirty-five feet of clearance without a full lift.

That was a first in American bridge engineering. The structure carried rail traffic until nineteen eighty-two and still carries Route Forty-One highway traffic daily. In twenty nineteen it was named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, and it was dedicated as one in twenty twenty-two, recognizing the design innovations that a Chicago engineering firm brought to this remote corner of the Upper Peninsula.