DENVER — Without the green arches, the Speer bridge from Interstate 25 to downtown Denver would just be another boring bridge.
Right now, it is undergoing surgery for all to see. And you can see a lot of it because traffic crawls through the construction site.
“It’s picturesque,” said Speer bridge admirer Chris Odiah.
He last drove over the bridge earlier in the week, which narrows from three lanes to two between Wewatta Street and I-25. Odiah sometimes takes his work outside at Confluence Park, with a view of the bridge over the South Platte River.
“Especially if you hang out by this Starbucks here, and over the river you watch it, especially if you’ve just driven through, you just feel like, ‘wow,’” Odiah said. “It’s under construction. I see it more for its aesthetic value,” Odiah said. “I think it’s great. It really looks good.”
“It was very sketchy. It was very confusing to go through it,” said Taylor Sutton.
Sutton, who was with her one-year-old, Sloane, at Confluence Park on Friday, said they have avoided the Speer bridge since last week.
“I will say we haven’t gone over it since. We have chosen other routes that weren’t under construction,” Sutton said.
If we are going to talk about a bridge under construction, in front of it, the least we could do is call it by a proper name.
“You want to actually name it something genuine or, like, comment on the condition of it?” Sutton said. “Sketch. That’s ‘Sketch’ bridge over there.”
“Being close to a Starbucks here, I will say, the ‘Speer Star,’” Odiah said.
“Archie? That is cute,” Sutton said.
What is going on with Archie anyway?
Archie started getting Botox in March.
“It’s a pretty routine preventative maintenance project that we’re doing on the Speer over Platte bridges. The goals of the project are to extend the usable life of the bridge,” said Denver Department of Transportation and Infrastructure (DOTI) Engineering Manager Brad Chamberlin.
Archie’s deck is being repaired, the expansion joints are being replaced, it is getting new water proofing and new asphalt.
“We equate it very similar to owning a house. You’ve got to replace your roof at certain intervals. You’ve got to replace water heaters. Bridges aren’t that different,” Chamberlin said. “Our main enemy here is, really, just water intrusion to the structure, so most of what we’re doing in this project is to try to keep water from intruding the structure itself.”
The project costs $17 million and about half of that is painting Archie’s arches.
Or, as the author of this article prefers, millions of dollars of makeup for Bridgeney Speer.
“What we’re really trying to prevent here is corrosion of the steel members themselves. The paint is really that frontline item that protects that steel from corrosion. So, while it does have the aesthetic benefits, it’s also a key structural member,” Chamberlin said.
Construction will take part in several stages. It is currently northbound Speer over the South Platte and Little Raven Street. It will move to the southbound side. After that, the bridge over the railroad will be done in each direction.
“By the time this project this is all done, we should be able to extend the bridge’s expected life span by 20 to 30 years,” Chamberlin said.
Two lanes of traffic will remain open throughout the project.
“I don’t necessarily have to go over that bridge. I don’t live over there, so if it closed, it would probably get done a lot quicker, but I’m assuming people would be a little bit more upset than I would be,” Sutton said.
“I’m actually looking forward to when it’s completed,” Odiah said. “It’s going to really add to the picturesque environment we have here.”
This is not the first bridge to have this type of rehab work done in downtown Denver. The Park Avenue viaduct from I-25 to Coors Field just went through this for two years.
“We believe the replacement cost of the Park Avenue viaduct is somewhere around a quarter billion dollars. So, the $15 [million] that we invested into the structure to get, again, another 20-to-30 years of service life out of it, is extremely good,” Chamberlin said.
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