Plans for extending the North Park Blocks as a Green Loop connection came under scrutiny by the Portland Design Commission on Thursday.

Commissioners held a design advice meeting for the planned parks infrastructure as a condition of the Broadway master plan, a 2019 document that governs portions of the area in Northwest Portland.

The project encompasses Northwest Glisan to Johnston streets, east of Northwest Park Avenue. City planners envision a winding, elevated path for bicyclists and pedestrians to connect the North Park Blocks to the Broadway Bridge.

The North Park Blocks would carry the Green Loop — a pedestrian-friendly and bicyclist-friendly route that will encircle the Central City.

Yet the project isn’t expected to be built for years, and the discussion Thursday was hobbled by unanswered questions regarding timing, sequencing and the feasibility of building and maintaining a linear park in the troubled Old Town Chinatown neighborhood.

Gary Datka, a Portland Parks & Recreation project manager, said construction would begin sometime after 2030.

“We would expect somewhere between 2030 and 2035 this gets developed,” he said.

That raised the question of how the parks bureau should manage the area in the meantime. The properties are owned by Prosper Portland and not yet managed by Parks & Recreation.

Some of the parcels are likely to be used for laying down construction equipment, Datka said, so it doesn’t make sense to build park infrastructure before private development occurs, only for it to be damaged by construction activities later.

Portland Parks & Recreation “doesn’t want to build a bridge to nowhere in the interim,” he said.

Commissioners suggested some sort of interim park use would be appropriate.

“It really has to be an interim park,” Chairwoman Chandra Robinson said.

Commissioner Zari Santner cautioned that Parks & Recreation must prepare now to maintain the linear park before it’s built.

Santner suggested a public-private partnership could be used to maintain the area.

“That is something very, very fundamental that the parks bureau needs to address at this time,” she said.

The bureau “has never had the funding to take care of urban parks,” Santner said.

The design itself, from Portland landscape architecture firm PLACE, drew praise and concerns.

“The ascent, the massing, for me it works,” Santner said.

She criticized other aspects of the design, saying railings play too large a role and compete with tree plantings.

Designers heard from community members that the path design should provide adequate separation between pedestrians and bicyclists. The design accomplishes that with dividers, planters and other cues, PLACE designer Miguel Camacho-Serna said.

The ascending pathway will create room for a roughly 4,000-square-foot retail space underneath, Camacho-Serna said.

Commissioners urged designers and city staff to find ways to make the park work.

“There’s so much beautiful space for passive enjoyment, but the space for active enjoyment is maybe a little bit missing,” said Commissioner Sarah Vaz, who suggested food carts or small shops could help.

“It depends on how it’s going to be programmed and what the active uses are around it,” she added.

Also on Thursday, design commissioners appointed new officers. Robinson was named chairwoman, and Joe Swank vice chairman. Votes for both positions were unanimous.

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Multnomah County is approaching completion of a project to replace four 8-foot-diameter Rall wheels on the Broadway Bridge in downtown Portland.

To allow crews to carry out related work, the bridge will close to all traffic the nights of April 2 and 3, the county announced. The Rall wheels, which allow the drawbridge section of the Broadway Bridge to open and close, were replaced last year after more than 100 continuous years of service.

The bridge will close to all traffic on Monday, after the last streetcar crossing of the day takes place at 11 p.m., according to county spokesman Mike Pullen. It will reopen at 5 a.m. on Tuesday. During the closure, a survey of drawbridge parts will be carried out and a shim will be installed on one of the tracks supporting the Rall wheels. The survey cannot be carried out with traffic present because of the bridge vibration it causes.

Then the bridge will again close to all traffic on Tuesday at 11 p.m., but then reopen periodically following temporary closures of up to 20 minutes. It will reopen without more disruptions at 5 a.m. on Wednesday.

Pullen said TriMet will detour several bus routes that normally use the Broadway Bridge south to the Steel Bridge.

Rall wheel replacement work by Hamilton Construction began in July 2017 and will finish this spring. The wheels and double-leaf drawbridge mechanism are rare. Using four large steel wheels, large weights are rolled back from the center, allowing larger weights to lift the bridge’s two center spans. The old cast wheels weighed some 56,000 pounds each, while new solid steel wheels forged by Portland’s Peninsula Iron Works carry more heft at 88,000 pounds apiece. The mechanism allows ships of any height to pass through the bridge. Peninsula Iron Works is the only facility of its type on the West Coast, and its handiwork can be found in all five of Portland’s movable bridges.

Complicating the work, each Rall wheel supports the entire weight of the opening spans, some 2,250 tons each. Because of this, work on the wheels could take place only when the spans were closed. Replacing the wheels required about three months for each side.

More information about the project is available at .

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In the early days of the 20th century, civil engineers were in an arms race to find the best ways to open a bridge.

One novel method was tried out by engineer Ralph Modjeski for Portland’s , completed in 1913. A Rall mechanism employs giant, 8-foot-diameter steel wheels that roll along tracks high above the center of the bridge.

To explain the mechanism’s complex movement to the uninitiated, it helps to have visual aids, said Jon Henrichsen, Multnomah County‘s division manager for bridges.

“It’s one weird, elliptical motion; it’s much easier to show with pictures, or, better yet, a video,” he said. “This is a very complicated bridge – way more complicated, really, than it needs to be. You can build a simpler bridge that’s easier to maintain and more reliable.”

Like an evolutionary dead end, the was en vogue for only about a decade before simpler, more efficient and economical systems took over. The Chicago-type bascule would become the standard of the style, an example being the Burnside Bridge. But in 2017, the Broadway Bridge and its unique design are still vital to Portland and the 32,000 people who cross the span daily. And now, after a century of rolling back and forth, its .

The four massive wheels have turned more conical than round, and cracks are showing up.

“There’s just a lot of issues with these,” Henrichsen said. “It’s time to replace them.”

The county has contracted with Springfield-based Hamilton Construction to replace the Broadway Bridge’s one-of-a-kind Rall wheels and the tracks and bearings, and rehabilitate the trunnion, control struts and associated structures. It’s a complex undertaking that requires a highly specialized skill set, and it presents its own engineering challenges – how to lift the bridge to swap out the wheels? How to make them?

To change the wheels, the Hamilton team is lifting the entire bridge, one 1,000-ton leaf at a time. Bridge engineer Ed Wortman likens the problem to jacking up a truck to change its tires, but in this case, no place on the bridge is hard enough to set the “jack.”

“It wasn’t designed to be lifted up into the air as we’re doing now,” Wortman said.

The solution created by OBEC Consulting Engineers of Eugene is a lift system that uses the stone and concrete piers under the bridge for bases, and thick steel plates welded to the bridge. Two 900-ton capacity jacks will work together to push thick posts upward.

This will all go on while bike and vehicle traffic and the Portland Streetcar are moving across the bridge.

“They’ll only lift it just enough to get those wheels out,” Wortman said. “Then it’s just like changing the tire on a car.”

Wortman was a bridge engineer for Multnomah County starting in the 1990s, but he began working on bridges in 1960. He’s worked part-time since his retirement in 2007, and was on site this month checking progress on the project.

“We always thought we were going to have to change these wheels, and we thought the designer probably made some accommodation for it,” he said. “Then we started looking at it, and it turned out, it wasn’t that easy.”

Ultimately, Wortman said, the decision to use the design was a financial one – it was slightly cheaper than the other two alternatives. Despite any trouble, it actually has done its job – creating the widest possible opening for ships – quite well, he said.

“It was a complicated system, but clever – but also, hard to maintain,” he said. “It’s pretty special. There’s not another bridge like it in the world.”

Each wheel supports about two million pounds of weight. But those wheels have been rolling back and forth for more than a century. The wheels are solid hunks of steel that start out about 30 to 40 percent larger before being pounded into shape. In 2017, not much metal is forged west of the Mississippi River, but VEGA contracted with Peninsula Iron Works to make the forgings.

The 88,000-pound wheels were forged – not cast, as were the originals – at Peninsula Iron Works. The original wheels had cored holes in them like spokes in a bicycle wheel, which helped make them considerably lighter. They were pounded out on the shop’s vertical boring mill, which was manufactured in 1968 but features modern automated CNC controls. They were flipped three times, and shipped on trucks with special permits.

“This is probably more accurate than they were done historically,” said James Johnson, president of Peninsula Iron Works. “Your big advantage today would be in how the materials were manufactured, compared to a casting.”

Johnson and his brother are the third generation to operate Peninsula. The fabrication shop performs 3,000 jobs per year. For this one, they were subcontracted under Vigor, which prepared plans and shipped the materials for the forgings. At more than 100 years old and the only shop like it on the West Coast, Peninsula aided the Allied war effort in World War I and mills serving the Pacific Northwest lumber industry. Its handiwork can be found nearly everywhere in the Portland area – including on all five movable bridges.

Once the new wheels are on, much testing will be needed to ensure they’re aligned with each other and the tracks are oriented perfectly. Among the updates incorporated into the project is breaking up the big metal struts that connect to the control room and pull the bridge open. Breaking them into three pieces, instead of one, makes for easier adjustments.

There will be one, final 48-hour closure over a weekend when final testing will be conducted. Once the old wheels are off, they will likely be shipped to a recycler, though the county has been in talks with the Regional Arts and Culture Council about using one in a public art installation, Henrichsen said.

In Modjeski’s day, bridges had much shorter life spans – maybe 20 years for the Broadway, Henrichsen said. The original operators of the bridge didn’t even grease its gears.

“He’d probably think we were crazy to still be operating this bridge,” Henrichsen said of Modjeski.

But a complete bridge replacement project would cost between $300 million and $400 million, and significantly impact commuters.

“After all these years, it still works well,” Wortman said. “So you can’t question the decision to build it in the first place.”

Broadway Bridge Rall wheel replacement

General contractor: Hamilton Construction

Cost: $13.5 million

Construction start: July

Expected completion: December

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With the Sellwood Bridge replacement project finished, Multnomah County is shifting its focus to three long-standing bridge projects in Portland.

Multnomah County officials will hold an open house Thursday to discuss upcoming work on the Broadway, Burnside and Morrison bridges. Traffic will be impacted in all cases.

The work includes replacing the four Rall wheels that open the Broadway Bridge, repairing and maintaining the Burnside Bridge, and replacing the lift span of the Morrison Bridge.

The county maintains five Willamette River crossings, including the Hawthorne Bridge.

The meeting will take place from 5 to 7 p.m. at the Multnomah Building at 501 S.E. Hawthorne Blvd.

For more information, contact Mike Pullen at 503-209-4111 or via email at mike.j.pullen@multco.us.

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Multnomah County Commissioners will send to the Department of Justice a proposal to use a construction manager-general contractor procurement model on the $10 million Broadway Bridge project.

Built in 1913, the bridge has a rare Rall bascule lift system that essentially rolls each 2,000 ton section of the bridge on bull wheels. Named after its inventor, Theodore Rall, the system went out of style. The Broadway Bridge is the largest of only three Rall bascule bridges left in the United States.

The project, which will involve replacing four, cracked counterweights that lift the bridge, will be highly risky and complicated, said Michael Pullen, a county spokesman.

The complex nature of the work, which includes aligning the Rall wheels and tracts and correctly locating control struts that guide the rotation of the bridge, prompted the county to consider a CM-GC procurement model, Pullen said.

“We didn’t want to go low bid on this,” he said. “If we hired somebody on a low bid contract and they didn’t do it right, there is a lot of damage they could do.”

Under a new state law that took effect July 1, the Department of Justice must review the bridge project to determine whether it meets state criteria to employ the CM-GC model. If the justice department gives its approve, the county would then move the issue to a public hearing phase before the end fo the year, Pullen said.

If the county does end up using a CM-GC model, design development would start in September and last through July, 2015. The construction contract would be awarded next summer after negotiation of a guaranteed maximum price, Pullen said.

Construction would start in November 2015 and be completed in November 2016, he said.

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Construction on a bridge is never easy, but building streetcar tracks across the nearly 100-year-old Broadway Bridge brought challenges to a new level, contractors said.

That part of the $148 million Portland Streetcar Loop project, which broke ground in August 2009, is almost finished. The rest of the track installation is set to wrap up on time by the end of the year, said Rick Gustafson, executive director of Portland Streetcar Inc., the company managing it.

“The streetcar construction on the east side is going really well,” Gustafson said. “What we define as ‘going well’ is that we’re on budget and on schedule.”

When finished, the existing Portland Streetcar system will be extended by 3.3 miles from the Pearl District across the bridge and south to the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

With the bridge work – the hardest part – now mostly behind them, workers shouldn’t face anything else that would slow them down, said Steve Wood, project manager with Stacy and Witbeck, the prime contractor for the job.

“We’ve just got a little bit of work left on the Broadway Bridge, a few structural modifications of the deck and some work on two more spans, which will be finished in April or May,” Wood said. “But most of what’s left is just getting track work done in the streets now.”

During the bridge work, crews had to be prepared to take everything off of the lift span with 72 hours notice, because boats still needed to be able to get through, Gustafson said.

The century-old mechanical aspects of the bridge challenged workers, and many accurate weight measurements were required to make sure the bridge still opened and closed correctly during the process, he said.

“It had to stay the same weight the whole time, or it wouldn’t lift correctly,” Gustafson said. “So they had a full-time structural engineer there doing nothing but weighing the bridge constantly.”

A subcontractor, Hamilton Construction, performed some of the more technical parts of the process. The firm replaced the bridge deck with fiber-reinforced concrete panels, worked with steel structures and handled mechanical systems during the track installation.

“About 90 percent of that track is now in,” Wood said. “We still need to install the overhead centenary system – the overhead power wires – which will start in spring and go into summer, but that won’t be nearly as involved.”

Workers will continue to move through east-side construction in three-block chunks. As of mid-February, underground prep work was almost finished and the project was approaching the MLK Viaduct and Oregon Route 99E.

The two remaining challenges for workers will be to build track over the main line railroad near OMSI and to integrate the streetcar loop with TriMet tracks at Holladay Street and Grand Avenue, Gustafson and Wood said.

“We have to be very careful going over the main line railroad, because (if) you have an incident, well, the main line railroad doesn’t like to be interrupted,” Gustafson said. “It’s always hard working on a bridge, but we’re not expecting any problems.”

The tie-in with TriMet shouldn’t be difficult, but it will be intense, Wood said. The work has to be finished over a weekend.

“We’ll have from 1 a.m. on a Saturday to 4 a.m. on a Sunday to wrap it up, because that’s how long TriMet is able to shut down that spot for,” Wood said. “We’ll be working 24/7 during that two-day time slot – no rest, just go-go-go.”

The opening date for the whole line was originally set for April 2012, but that has been bumped back a bit because crews need more time to test the lines once they’re installed and also because some time may be needed to acquire the trolley cars needed for the expansion, Gustafson said.

“The proposal is to have the line open on Sept. 21, 2012, but that has not been adopted by anybody yet,” Gustafson said.

Cars are scheduled for delivery in July 2012, he added.

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The Broadway Bridge will close from Tuesday at 8 p.m. until 5 a.m. Wednesday morning.

The closure is due to the latest round of work on the $148 million Portland Streetcar Loop project.

According to Kay Dannen, spokeswoman for Portland Streetcar, the bridge will need to be raised Tuesday evening for construction crews to work on the span locks. Crews will work to finish welding the span locks of the bridge.

Dannen said the bridge will close again in the future for streetcar construction, but contractors are not sure of the exact dates.

Two lanes of traffic will reopen on Wednesday, with larger vehicles such as RVs and buses remaining banned from the bridge until 2011, when construction on the bridge is scheduled to finish. Both bike and pedestrian lanes will also reopen on Wednesday.

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The Broadway Bridge will do what millions of Americans can only dream of – add 240,000 pounds without changing its weight.

When two of the four lanes of the Broadway Bridge reopen to traffic Saturday, drivers will travel along a bridge that has been following a rather complex weight-loss plan: For every pound the bridge added in the form of steel streetcar tracks, it had to lose a pound of existing materials.

The tracks had to be added to the bridge as part of the city’s $148 million Portland Streetcar Loop Project. But the Broadway Bridge is a bascule bridge, which uses counterweight and balance to lift the spans. The added weight of the steel tracks could throw off the balance, preventing the spans on the bridge from lifting high enough for boats to pass underneath. So engineers had to calculate how to maintain the delicate balance of weight required for the bridge to operate.

The logical answer was to reduce the basic weight of the spans themselves. Engineers examined the materials and components of the bridge spans in order to determine which, if any, could be switched for newer, lighter materials. Their attention soon focused on the roadway, bike paths and various support structures.

A significant portion of work went into confirming the actual weight of materials that crews removed from the bridge and comparing that real-life information with the weight listed in the engineering plans, said Mark Bodyfelt, structures manager for Stacy and Witbeck Inc., the construction manager/general contractor on the project. More than once, materials were placed on a scale to ensure that what was going on the bridge was equal to what was coming off.

“You’re working on a 100-year-old bridge, so some things aren’t exactly what you would anticipate because parts of it have changed over time,” Bodyfelt said.

The first round of trimming came in early July, when all four lanes were closed to automobile traffic. Bodyfelt said crews began pulling up the polymer material that makes up the roadways on the lift spans of the bridge and replacing it with a lighter, thinner polymer. Older steel structural components also were removed from the lift spans and replaced with lighter steel components.

Additional weight was cut after the bridge was closed to pedestrians in mid July. The pedestrian areas on both sides of the bridge spans were gutted, according to Kay Dannen, community relations manager for the Portland Streetcar Loop Project. The old galvanized steel panels which lined the pedestrian and bike paths were pulled up and replaced with lighter reinforced fiberglass decking. Heavier steel components used to make hand and guard rails along the paths were also removed and replaced with lighter materials.

The bike and pedestrian path along the south side of the Broadway Bridge will also reopen on Saturday, but the north section will remain closed until construction on the path concludes Sept. 16.

This weekend marks the first time cars will use the Broadway Bridge since it closed in July, but only two of the bridge’s four lanes will be open. Streetcar tracks are still being laid on the two closed lanes.

Larger vehicles such as RVs and buses are banned from the bridge until 2011, when construction on the bridge is scheduled to finish.

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Sections of the Broadway Bridge in Portland are set to reopen Saturday after being closed for streetcar construction since July 6.

One lane of traffic will reopen in each direction across the Willamette River, but two lanes of the bridge will remain closed until June 2011. The south sidewalk will also be reopened to pedestrians and cyclists, but the north sidewalk is expected to remain closed until Sept. 16.

Dan Anderson, spokesman for the Portland Bureau of Transportation, said the project is on schedule and meeting expectations.

The bridge will remain closed to trucks and other large vehicles until June. Until then, a height restriction will be imposed on vehicles taller than 12 feet.

PBOT warns that traffic could be delayed because of continued construction on the Broadway Bridge and additional streetcar construction planned for Northwest Lovejoy Street in September.

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Hamilton Construction has removed the part of the Broadway Bridge‘s concrete deck where Portland Streetcar tracks will run and is adding steel beams and rebar to make it stronger. The bridge is now closed to all traffic until Sept. 3. Hamilton Construction is subcontracting to general contractor Stacy and Witbeck Inc.

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