City - Buffalo NY - The original Michigan Ave Bridge 1900 - Side by Side

by Mike Savad

Title

City - Buffalo NY - The original Michigan Ave Bridge 1900 - Side by Side

Artist

Mike Savad

Medium

Photograph - Hdr Photography

Description

Colorized photo from 1900
Original title: Jack-knife bridge
Photographer: Detroit Publishing
Location: Michigan ave bridge, Buffalo, NY

This is a steam powered bridge, built in 1895, and its what it used to look like before an accident in 1959. The simplified version of the story is, one day in January, there was a warm spell that thawed the river. Chunks of ice forced a very large boat from its mooring, and pushed it down river. This was a huge ship, foot ball field sized, it ran into another vessel, the Tewksbury. This became known as the Tewksbury accident, the boat hit the bridge and totally destroyed it. It was rebuilt in 1960.

Now the color of the bridge is left open to debate. I found around 6 post cards, each one had their own color scheme. Two were greenish like this, two were red, matching the buildings (my guess it was easier just painting over all of it), two were uncolored. Being that I want the bridge to stand out against the background, and I really do think it was bluish like the current bridge, I made it this color. It was a pain to color, everything had to be done by hand, it took a while.

The tugboats apparently have a certain coloring in this area, hunter green on the bottom, bright red on the top with a white stripe. Even today they use these colors.

I couldn't really decide on the buildings, some looked metal, others looked like stone or concrete, but all postcards from all years suggested red, so its red.

Uploaded

July 9th, 2019

Statistics

Viewed 3,044 Times  -  Last Visitor from New York, NY on 04/19/2024 at 5:38 PM

Colors

Embed

Share

Sales Sheet

Tags