Like a mighty arm reaching across the Penobscot River, the new Bangor-Brewer bridge has finally seized hold of the other side. After 20 months of construction, the four-lane concrete-and-steel span will officially open at 11 a.m. today.

The new structure, to be named “The Penobscot Bridge,” will replace the old steel truss bridge that sits rusty and forlorn nearby, like an erector set some child has carelessly tossed aside.

“History is being made today,” said Rep. Dick Campbell, R-Holden, last week as he planned today’s celebration, which includes a ribbon-cutting ceremony, speeches by legislators and the unveiling of a plaque naming the bridge. “This is the bridge which will take us into the millenium. After many years, we have finally accomplished a goal which was set by citizens on both sides of the river. From now on, crossing the Penobscot will be more convenient and more inviting.”

Meanwhile, Bob Zimmerman, Department of Transportation contract manager, sat in his tiny trailer at the construction site, pondering the fact that, for him, the opening of the bridge is by no means the end of the project.

“Really, it’s just another phase,” said the engineer, as he looked out the window to where his work crews could be seen installing the railing. “I still have to clean up odds and ends.”

One hour after the new span is opened, the old bridge will be closed and barricaded. It is due to be dismantled beginning July 7. Zimmerman, who will oversee the three-month razing process, said nearly 100 tons of steel will drop into the river, then be collected and taken to a junkyard.

During its lifetime, the old bridge boasted several different facades atop the same piers from the time it was built in 1832. It was the only link between Bangor and Brewer until the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge opened Nov. 1, 1954, at a cost of $2,500,000. The Veterans Remembrance Bridge — the third span between the twin cities — opened Veterans’ Day, 1986, and cost $57 million.

The nearby railroad bridge, which was built in 1873 on that location by the Bangor and Bucksport Railroad, is not affected.

Zimmerman, who will supervise repairs to the Joshua Chamberlain Bridge, said repairs on that span are also scheduled to begin July 7 and hopes they will be done some time in November. The bridge will be closed during construction.

For Zimmerman, the building of the new $14 million bridge posed new and different challenges. The 950-foot-long structure was the “longest, widest and most expensive” bridge he had ever worked on.

Controlling traffic and coordinating construction with the telephone, power, cable and water companies proved complicated at times, he admitted.

“Still, it’s been a lot of fun,” he said.

A bridge in time

The oldest bridge was built as a toll bridge by the Bangor Bridge Co. at a cost of $40,000. The 440-foot structure was the earliest covered bridge in the state. Deborah Thompson’s “History of Bangor” describes it as “a light-colored, pitched-roof bridge, resting on a great stone pier at the Bangor shore, with two widely spaced, small diamond-shaped windows.”

Washed away in 1846 when a four-mile ice jam destroyed it along with other buildings along the water’s edge, the bridge was rebuilt the next year by the Bangor Bridge Co. at a cost of $31,000. According to historians, it was built under a design known as Howe’s Improved Patent of the Truss Plan, and measured 792 feet — the longest covered bridge in the state.

In 1902, the Bangor Daily News included an account of yet another flood in which the midsection of the bridge was demolished: “Brewer people were marooned in Bangor, and some Bangor people in Brewer by the going out of a span of the Brewer bridge.”

This time, it was the Bangor-Brewer Bridge Co. that tended to the repairs, replacing the gap with a steel span.

“An odd contrast was formed between the metal section and the wooden spans on each end,” wrote Mildred Thayer in her history of Brewer published in 1962. “For about nine years the mongrel bridge, half wood and half steel, served the people of the two communities.”

In 1912, the Boston Bridge Co. rebuilt the 658-foot-long bridge in its present form at a cost of $73,772.

A Bangor Daily News article of Nov. 28, 1911, offered an update on the project: “The highly trained specialists who are rebuilding the Bangor-Brewer bridge are getting along finely. The way they juggle steel in all shapes and sizes and drop it in place is astonishing. The work is going on without impeding traffic.”

Three months later, the Boston Post heralded the opening of the bridge: “The old toll bridge across the Penobscot River between Bangor and Brewer became a thing of the past this week when the new steel structure was formally opened to the public and approved by Engineer E.E. Greenwood of Skowhegan.”

The bridge has undergone numerous repairs during the last 20 years, according to Zimmerman.

“It’s been a constant headache,” he said.

Problems with the bridge came to a head in the 1980s. DOT traffic studies indicated the bridge’s two lanes were no longer enough to accommodate the ever-increasing traffic, and deteriorating structural conditions resulted in the posting of the bridge from 17 to three tons. That measure eliminated ambulance and tractor-trailer traffic.

DOT engineers said the bridge has continued to be a source of problems.

According to Larry Roberts, the welds holding the steel grid portion of the deck are forever coming loose; salt from the roads is eroding the floor beams; and river currents and ice floes are continually jarring the stone piers.

Engineers said although the DOT had investigated spending $3 million to repair the old one, alterations wouldn’t have enabled the three-ton limit to be lifted. Also, the need for additional lanes wouldn’t have been addressed because a truss bridge cannot be widened.

Memories set in steel

Now that the old bridge’s days have ended, area residents were moved to reflect on their memories of the structure.

Bob Brennan, 72, who grew up on Hancock Street in Bangor, recalled summer afternoons as a young boy playing tag on the top of the girders, roughly 60 feet above the water..

“Every once in a while we’d jump off,” recalled Brennan, who now lives in Old Town. “But one time I went off accidentally. I hit the water face first and was knocked out for a few seconds.”

“Of course I went back for more!” he said, chuckling.

Dick Shaw, editorial page assistant at the Bangor Daily News, was only 5 or so but he still remembers the fun of crossing the bridge on the way home from Bar Harbor in the 1950s.

“We’d put our feet on the floor and laugh at the vibrations we’d get from the the corrugated steel on the deck,” Shaw said.

John Lord, Bangor’s city planner, recalled the tongue lashings policemen would give him for crossing the bridge in traffic on his bicycle in 1951.

“I would tell them I was just trying to go home, but they weren’t very sympathetic,” said Lord.

And Brian Higgins, president of the Brewer Historical Society and a professional photographer, remembered winning a Bangor State Fair photo contest years ago for his photograph of the bridge in the early morning fog.

Residents have also been privy to other information surrounding the bridge.

John Frawley, former Bangor city engineer, learned that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the Bangor Bridge Co. didn’t think the bridge was strong enough to support the area’s trolley system.

The Bangor and Brewer trolleys would let people out just before the bridge at either end, and people would either have to walk across the bridge to pick up a trolley on other side, or drive their horse and wagon across, Frawley said.

Higgins was told by one Brewer man years ago that horses would often refuse to go through the covered bridge because it was so dark. Part of the center was eventually left open to let in more light on both sides, Higgins said, alluding to a picture postcard in which it appears that walls halfway down have been taken out.

Mildred Thayer remembers her mother’s story about the consternation involved with crossing the bridge just after the 1902 flood when she and Mildred’s father were courting. Planks had been set down as a temporary floor, Thayer said, and because her mother lived in Bangor, and her father in Brewer, traversing the boards was a must if the lovers were to meet.

“Those planks must have been a little detrimental to their getting together,” Thayer said, chuckling. “But if they wanted to see each other, they had to cross them.”

Shaw said his mother was a source for all kinds of stories about the old bridge. One tale involved a fight between Bangor and Brewer high school football teams after a particularly rivalrous Veterans Day football game in the 1930s.

“It was like a rumble right in the middle of the bridge,” Shaw said. “My mother thought that was pretty exciting.”

“The bridge was a metaphor for all kinds of things for my mother,” he continued. “During a violent thunderstorm, she’d tell us that the devil was rolling barrels across the Bangor-Brewer bridge.”

Charles Bragg of Bangor said the bridge may have saved his life. He was an infant when the fire of 1911 broke out. He said his parents wheeled him across the bridge to safety at his grandparents’ home in Brewer.

A new era

Roberts said the new bridge was built with an eye toward economics, aesthetics and the environment.

Steel girders were chosen because the spaces between the piers can be longer than with concrete, he said. That means fewer piers and less impact on wetlands, as well as a less cluttered appearance.

“We’ve actually added more wetland to the river base because we’ve used fewer piers,” he said.

According to Roberts, the project has also helped revitalize the waterfront.

“We have accommodated Brewer’s desire to build a park there and stabilized the river banks,” he said.

Some might lament that the sleek, modernistic lines of the new bridge pale in comparison to the craftsmanship and quaintness of the old bridge.

But according to a University of Maine civil engineering professor, today’s bridge designers pay closer attention than ever to aesthetics.

“Bridges are being looked at as landmarks,” said Professor Aly Nazmy, an expert on bridge construction. “And their looks are every bit as important as their functionality.”

According to Nazmy, the curved girders between each steel beam reflect a sound structural design. Parallel girders would be wasteful, he said, because that would require more concrete than needed.

“When the look of a bridge reflects a sound structural design, there is beauty in it,” he added.

Although area residents have taken the imminent demise of the old bridge rather stoicly, a sense of loss still abounds.

“I think everybody will miss that bridge,” said Lord, Bangor’s planning officer. “It’s a real landmark.”

“I feel somewhat nostalgic about that old bridge,” admitted Frawley, “particularly because truss bridges are slowly disappearing.”

Historian Deborah Thompson said she, too, will regret its absence.

“I’ll miss that its location is the site of the first bridge,” she said. `If they could only leave the piers in the river that would be enough of a memento for me.”

However, according to Roberts, removing the old piers is part of the mitigation effort with the DEP.

“We can only have so many piers taking up the bottom of the river,” he said. “The more piers, the more disruption of wetlands.”

Still, history lovers have come up with various ways to indulge their sentimentality.

Higgins said the DOT has agreed to salvage a few sections of railing for students at Eastern Maine Technical College in Bangor to cut up into small pieces. The Brewer Historical Society plans to sell them as paperweights to raise funds for the Chamberlain Freedom Park and for a joint scholarship.

Roberts said the DOT would also donate granite from the piers to be used for park benches.

And thanks to Edward Foley of Brewer, the cast iron plaque that used to hang on the Bangor side of the bridge noting the date of its construction is now part of the Bangor Historical Society collection.

Foley, who noticed the plaque on his drives from Bangor to his home in Brewer, suggested to Bangor Historical Society director Susan Sager that it be added to her collection before someone removed it for a souvenir.

“It’s one of the things you do if you care about history,” said Foley, who has published articles about local history. “I’m glad she got it for future generations. Years go by and people like to have things like this as a reminder of days gone by.”

Foley has of late noticed holes on a girder on the Brewer side of the bridge, indicating that some kind of a marker had probably hung there as well.

Sighs of relief

Meanwhile, Brewer merchants with businesses at the foot of the new bridge are breathing a collective sigh of relief that the construction is all but over.

“It’s been a long year,” said Mark Braveman, owner of Mark’s Music, who plans on holding a customer appreciation day today to thank patrons for “putting up with the hassle of the construction.”

Kent Bailey, owner of Parker Bailey Moving and Storage, said he’s looking forward to his trucks being able to “finally go out the dooryard and across the bridge” instead of having to drive to Bangor via the Chamberlain Bridge.

And Marie Whitcomb, owner of Whitcomb’s Garage, said although the inconveniences associated with the construction had hurt her business, the new bridge “will work out fine in the long run.”

Still, tearing down the old bridge doesn’t sit particularly well with her.

“It seems we’re always getting rid of history,” Whitcomb said.

Back in his trailer, project manager Zimmerman also views the dismantling process with some aversion.

“I hate to see a 100-year-old bridge fall in the river,” he said, shaking his head. “But that’s progress, I guess.”