The Manette Bridge

Port Washington Narrows is the tidal strait that cuts through the middle of Bremerton, dividing the city between its western commercial core and the Manette Peninsula to the east. The currents run to four knots on a strong tide. For the first decades of Bremerton's existence, the two sides of the city were connected primarily by small boats. Getting from Manette to downtown meant water, or a significant detour by road around the head of the narrows.

The Manette Bridge changed that. Construction began in October of nineteen twenty-nine, the same month the stock market collapsed. The Union Bridge Company of Portland, Oregon did the work, and the finished bridge opened on June twenty-first, nineteen thirty. It spanned one thousand five hundred seventy-three feet across the narrows. It charged a toll: twenty-five cents for a car, five cents for a pedestrian. The Washington Toll Bridge Authority bought it in nineteen thirty-seven and eliminated the toll two years later, having recovered the purchase price in a year and a half.

The bridge served Bremerton for more than eighty years. Its wooden approach spans were replaced with concrete and steel in nineteen forty-nine. Engineers patched it and maintained it decade after decade. But by the early two-thousands, it was deemed functionally obsolete.

The replacement bridge opened on November tenth, twenty eleven. It kept the name. The Manette neighborhood it serves has become one of the more economically diverse and culturally active corners of the city: old working-class bungalows alongside coffee shops and small restaurants, the kind of neighborhood that tends to emerge when a waterfront city starts finding its footing again.

The original nineteen-thirty bridge is gone. The narrows look much the same as they always have, the current moving as it always does, indifferent to the structures humans choose to string across it.