Last December, following roughly seven years of neighborhood ire, U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown wrote to railway magnate Norfolk Southern to lambast the embattled company about the decrepit state of their bridge just south of Edgewater Park.
Norfolk Southern owns 20 rail properties in the city; 16 of them,
, were in less-than-ideal condition: rusting beams, crumbling concrete. Months earlier, after Brown’s first letter that May, Norfolk Southern “
” to clean up the Lake Avenue Bridge—scrubbing walls, throwing plywood boards above the sidewalk.
Yet, Brown saw the repairs as nothing more than half-assed.
“As evidenced by the current condition of the bridge,”
, “your company’s efforts were clearly insufficient.”
A year later, Brown’s assessment doesn’t seem too far off.
With its cracked rust iron facade, still decrepit walls and falling concrete, the Lake Avenue Bridge is, to this day, nowhere near the complete rehabilitation that nearby neighbors have been asking for since 2016. Those efforts became more organized in 2018, when the Friends of the Lake Avenue Bridge group was created—and took clean-up efforts into their own hands.