Bridge dedication

The Bicentennial Park Bridge, which I have referred to in many posts as the Talbert Bridge, is now officially open. The dedication ceremony was held on Tuesday.

The people started gathering twenty minutes before the ceremony.

As more people gathered, they moved to the north end of the bridge. Shortly before eleven, the mayor arrived.

Then everyone walked over the bridge to the south side, where the official ribbon cutting took place. I was not positioned well to get a picture of that--I was in the back of the crowd, so I could not see it.

The dedication ends an ongoing stream of posts that began even before this blog came into existence. I never expected when I did my first post on this subject that it would take over three years to come to a conclusion. The bridge is meant as a part of a trails system, so perhaps the development of trails will provide new subjects for this blog.

Many of the people who attended parked in the new parking lot for Bicentennial Park. Last week park workers were using the broken asphalt from the recent street repairs to surface it. The new shelter now has a name, the Ervin L.Marlin Sr Picnic Shelter. It was made possible by donations from a member of the Marlin family.

The dedication was the first publicly scheduled use of the new shelter. Donut holes and hot chocolate were on the menu.

A press release for the dedication can be found here. (It is a pdf). There were about fifty people at the event, and almost all of them were on the bridge at the same time, which gave it a really nice bounce and showed that it is safe. There were many people who contributed money or time or expertise to making this bridge possible, and only some of them attended.