Tacoma’s Murray Morgan Bridge grew out of the city’s development as a transportation center after the Northern Pacific Railroad chose Tacoma as its western terminus in 1873. A swing bridge on 11th Street over City Waterway was completed in 1895, and the current vertical lift bridge was constructed by the city and opened on February 15, 1913. In 1957, the state took ownership when 11th Street became State Route 509, and in 1982 the bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places. It was renamed for Murray Morgan in 1997, closed to traffic in 2007 because of structural deficiencies, returned to city ownership in 2010, and rehabilitated and rededicated on February 15, 2013. The lift span is 220 feet long and weighs about 2 million pounds, balanced by two concrete counterweights of about one million pounds each, which allow small electric motors to raise and lower the bridge. Operating cables, drums, gears, drive shafts, and motors in the machinery room work together to lift the span 70 feet in two minutes, while an auxiliary 25 horsepower motor can raise it in 8 minutes if power is lost. Earlier, the original design included a manual capstan that allowed men to raise the bridge in more than 3 hours, and prisoners from the county jail were reportedly used for that labor. Murray Morgan served as a bridge tender in the 1950s and worked on his book, Skid Road, from the operator’s house.