A Span of a Half-Century

Originally published in the Gloucester County Times on April 08, 2007, but was lost in a website redesign.

The pale green eastern approach to the Walt Whitman Bridge dominates the view from Charlie Cattell’s front porch.

For 50 years, the bridge has bisected Cattell’s horizon, the constant flow of traffic washing his Gloucester City block in a dull tidal swish of passing automobiles.

This May, the bridge will celebrate its golden anniversary, marking those 50 years since it opened on May 16, 1957.

Cattell witnessed the beginnings of what would become the Delaware River Port Authority’s cash cow, a bridge that last year generated more than $77.5 million in tolls.

More cars travel across the Walt Whitman Bridge in a single year than the Commodore Barry and Betsy Ross bridges combined. In 2006 alone, the bridge saw 21.6 million vehicles pass state-to-state, speeding high above Cattell’s house.

“We sorta wondered what if would be like; would there be traffic noise, would there be exhaust bothering us?” said Cattell. “We have had no effect from it. It is just there, a forgone conclusion.”

For Cattell and his neighbors, whose two-story row homes are dwarfed by the bridge’s mammoth iron and asphalt approach, the Walt Whitman is as much a part of the landscape as the factories spewing steam in the distance.

For those who laid the framework for hat would become the nation’s 12th largest suspension bridge, the anniversary is a chance to grasp history.

“This is something you remember. It will be there after I am gone,” said retired ironworker Marty Stanley of the bridge. “Looking back on memories, most of them were good, but there were some damn cold nights.”

Stanley worked on the Walt Whitman for three years, balancing on iron beams and a latticework of plywood walkways for eight hours a day, five days a week, some 153 feet above the Delaware River.

“To tell you the truth, I said I would never work on it,” Stanley said. “You go down there — stand looking at all that stuff — you figure there are probably better things I can do for money.”

Despite his apprehension, Stanley worked the bridge from bottom to top, spending most of his time securing large iron beams as a connector.

This was back in the dangerous old days, before connectors tied off to the bridge for safety. Stanley would ride the Walt Whitman’s diagonal iron beams like a slide, he recalled, jamming his feet against the sides to stop his decent.

“You know it’s dangerous,” he admitted. “It is something you grow up with as an ironworker. You work from the ground up, so it is just a case of going up another eight to 10 feet. it becomes an acquired ability, but I sure wouldn’t want to do it now.”

During Stanley’s three years on the Walt Whitman, two men lost their lives.

One was a fellow ironworker who struck the ground less than a mile from Cattell’s Warren Street home. Another was a painter who tried desperately to grasp a rope on his way down, but the paint made his gloves too slippery.

His body was lost to the river.

“He fell and grabbed the rope, but it was covered in paint and he went straight down,” Stanley remembered.

Old-timers say it was the Walt Whitman Bridge, more than anything else, that opened Gloucester County to the development it sees today.

“All you had before was the Ben Franklin, and in ’57 when this opened it opened a whole new section of the country to people in Philadelphia,” remarked Carlton Read, the DRPA’s former manager of public information and former Monroe Township resident.

“Whole portions down there in South Jersey were nothing but farms,” he added. “It is like the old saying — when you build a field, they will use it. Well, when you build a bridge they will use it.”

It’s the Walt Whitman that drew Vincent Grosso from South Philadelphia to one of Washington Township’s first developments, Whitman Square.

“I had a high-pressure job, and I wanted someplace where I could sit back and relax,” Grosso said. “We had looked at this area before the Walt Whitman Bridge was built and decided that it was too far a drive to work in Philadelphia.”

With the bridge completed, however, New Jersey south of Camden County became fair game for suburban-minded Philadelphians.

“I used to drive to work, and from Whitman Square heading to Philadelphia I wouldn’t run into more than six cars heading to Philly,” Grosso said. “I was the atmosphere I was looking to live in, a very quiet farming town.”

Transplants like Grosso set the precedent for what would become a county-wide population boom, as early residents moved into Washington and Deptford townships to enjoy suburban living within a quick commute to Philadelphia.