Warehouse Row - The Wynkoop Street Bridge

There is a picture from the Cornell University Library in the US Railroad Commission photographs that shows a very busy section of Wynkoop Street where it crosses Cherry Creek on a skewed Pratt through Truss bridge that figured prominently in my decision to shift which railroad I was modeling and what location to use.

This is the photo, the original is black and white, I was trying out some colorizing software and there are a few odd color selections being made by the software (check the blue section in between the trusses at the end). I'm not sure exactly when the photo was taken but it can't be any later than 1960.

And here is the original

From a slightly different angle

This particular picture is what convinced me to shift from modeling the "Patch" district in LA to Warehouse row in Denver. Now admittedly I'm still clutching at a few straws around actual operations but I have the general area figured out pretty good, or at least I thought I did. I was in a D&RGW discussion group and it was noted that the bridge, apparently, doesn't show up on the listing of D&RGW steel bridges (I suppose I need to try and verify that).

Which also brought up the fact that crossing the bridge to the south actually takes you directly into the C&S' Rice Yard, although you can get to the D&RGW 7th street yard. So which railroad actually switched the area and who owned the bridge? And just to confuse the issue on an old Sanborn Map (1903) the trackage is listed as D&RG/UP trackage, so maybe the UP owns the bridge, although their yards were to the north so probably not. Yet another little mystery. I might have come full circle and need to model the C&S in the '50s and '60s.

Thanks to a couple of websites I at least know who built the bridge; The Pennsylvania Steel Company and it was built in 1907 (which is after the date on the Sanborn map, not really relevant except that this one must have replaced an iron bridge that existed previously since Sanborn indicates it is an iron bridge in 1903).

Photo by Bob Morgan 2/2009

Photo by Bob Morgan 2/2009