Scavenger Hunt location: Frosty Falls Ice Cream
Historical location: Dekalb Street Bridge
While we don’t have much history preserved about the building that Frosty Falls is in, there is a lot of exciting information surrounding the bridges of Bridgeport’s past and present. Throughout the years, there have been many bridges built to connect Bridgeport to Norristown over the Schuylkill River. Today, we’ll be reviewing the history of the Dekalb Street Bridge.
The Covered Bridge
In 1830, the first bridge was completed and open for business, allowing easy passage from Bridgeport to Norristown and back again. The original bridge at the Dekalb Street location we know today (right next to Frosty Falls) had different qualities than the bridge that currently exists. The first bridge was actually a covered bridge, which was helpful for many business owners and those who kept animals. This bridge was privately owned and was maintained for by tolls paid by its crossers. Today’s bridge serves pedestrians, vehicles, and now offers a safe bicycle path as a connector of the Schuylkill River Trail (SRT) and Chester Valley Trail (CVT). In addition to the 1830s bridge offering passage to pedestrians, it also catered to those crossing with sheep and cattle, and to horses and wagons moving goods between the two port towns.
The Cost of Bridge Maintenance
For the next forty years, not much changed. In the 1870s, Bridgeport resident William Rennyson began a movement to get rid of the tolls for crossing the Bridge, even though that is what was paying for its upkeep. Passage cost pedestrians one penny at the time, but more if they had animals joining them: for up to six animals, the toll was four cents, and for a herd of sheep or a horse and wagon, it cost even more. It is crucial to note the importance of the bridge’s maintenance and the cost to cross it because shortly before the efforts to rid the bridge of any tolls, it was rebuilt in 1861, which created the need for new tolls. Nevertheless, the group’s efforts paid off and in 1884 the tolls were removed.
Bridge Issues
When automobiles arrived early in the 20th century, cars would cross one at a time, but a build up of gas and oil on the wood decking led to a massive fire when a car backfired and ignited a blaze that destroyed the wooden bridge in 1924. Thankfully the engineers learned their lesson and replaced the wooden structure with a new concrete bridge to prevent it from burning down again. While there have been updates to the bridge since 1924, with the most recent being the 2022 addition of the SRT-CVT connection for safe bicycling, this has become the bridge that we know today: concrete, uncovered, designed for both pedestrians and automobiles (and now bikes), and toll-free.
