A place only becomes a place as it accumulates memories. Recently, the city blocked off both ends of the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge and began work replacing it. The former bridge, the bridge I’d grown to love, had wooden slats reinforced here and there with sheet metal where the wood had begun to rot. It was almost impossible to set up a tripod and take a long exposure because the minute anybody else stepped onto the bridge, it began to shake. And in a mild breeze, the whole structure wobbled. My wife refused to step onto the bridge because she was afraid it would come crashing down into the ravine below. But I enjoyed pausing in the middle of it and imagining I was on a ship in rough weather.
Unless you look closely, you might miss the fact that the bridge is pasted over with memories. Some of those memories are public, some personal. Most obvious is the plaque at the north end advising that the writer, Morley Callaghan, used to walk his dog, Nikki, every day across the bridge. In fact, the bridge is often call the Morley Callaghan Footbridge although I’m not sure if that’s its official name. More recently, the bridge appeared in an episode of the Hulu production of The Handmaid’s Tale. I know, because I was walking underneath the bridge at the time and accidentally fucked up one of their takes. And just a few weeks ago, a psychopath gunned down an an innocent exchange student outside the Glen Road entrance to the Sherbourne subway station at the south end of the bridge. I didn’t say all the memories had to be happy memories.
Once the city has finished its project, dismantling the old bridge and replacing it with the new, will this still be the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge? I suppose this question is a variation on the Ship of Theseus paradox: if you replace each plank of the ship until none of the original planks remains, can you say that it’s the same ship? In the case of this bridge, if you reconstruct it and give it the same name as the original bridge, does it still support all those memories? Or does it hasten their disappearance? Like shadows running away in the night.
