The Harrison Avenue Bridge

Designed by prominent engineer A. Burton Cohen, the Harrison Avenue Bridge was constructed between July 1921 and September 1922 by the Anthracite Bridge Company of Scranton. Residents from South and East Scranton overcame economic and neighborhood differences to form the South to East Scranton Bridge Association and lobby the city for a bridge across Roaring Brook that would directly connect their neighborhoods. Similar in design to Cohen's Tunkhannock Viaduct for the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad, the bridge was completed 20 years after its initial design because of funding delays. Its erection was overseen by William Schunk, a native of Scranton and the city's chief engineer. The bridge had three spans totaling more than 406 feet: southern and northern elliptical filled spandrel arches 75 feet long, and a central three-centered, four-rib, open-spandrel arch more than 200 feet long and about 125 feet above Roaring Brook. In 1988 it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion C in engineering as an extraordinary example of a reinforced concrete open-spandrel bridge. Its original design used minimal ornamentation, symmetry, grooves on the columns to vary surface texture, and plain abutment walls, and it stood as a monumental structure that symbolized Scranton's progressive era in the early twentieth century. A history of structural problems led to major repairs and rehabilitation in the 1930s, 1940s, 1970s, and 2000s. Beginning in 2014, after advanced deterioration, the historic bridge was replaced in approximately the same location, with the new bridge's south end about 110 feet west of the original south end and its north end slightly overlapping the original north end.

Scranton, Pennsylvania · United States