I stood in the kitchen, a sink full of warm, sudsy water in front of me, and watched the bottle of Ajax dish soap vibrate on the windowsill.

Saturday, March 02, 2002

I stood in the kitchen, a sink full of warm, sudsy water in front of me, and watched the bottle of Ajax dish soap vibrate on the windowsill.

Every few seconds, there was a loud but muffled bang off in the distance, and a split second later the wood floor would shake beneath my feet. The window panes would rattle slightly in their frames.

The viaduct bridge, a block south of my house, is coming down, and believe you me, my household noticed it right away. The morning the demolition began, my wife called to tell me the house was shaking. As the machines began whirring and the workers began dropping their big old wrecking ball on the bridge, the neighborhood in the area got a sense of what the next few weeks will be like.

The noise has been pretty much constant between 7 a.m. and 5 p.m. At first, we had a loud bang-crunch-rumble sound accompanied by the vibrations. Thursday we started hearing kind of a reverberating metallic THWAP! sound, like somebody was banging a gigantic piece of sheet metal. Friday the sounds were more like THUD … THUD … THUD. As you can see, I don’t know much about construction or demolition, but I’m an expert in onomatopoeia.

I thought the bridge project would make traffic around the house slow down, but it has apparently picked up. For one, people are still trying to take Adams Avenue under the bridge, then seeing the barricades and angrily speeding away down William Street to go around. Second, it seems like the Bridge Show has become popular for spectators, or at least it was in the first few days, when the bridge still had form and shape that was being chipped away. I saw vehicles drive up to the spot where the road is blocked and sit there for a long time, watching the hypnotic wrecking ball fall over and over, knocking chunks of the bridge down and sending little poofs of dust up. Now that much of the bridge has been reduced to piles of rubble, the spectators have thinned out a little.

I stood on my front porch and watched for a while early in the process. It was kind of fun; I found myself waiting for the ball to fall again and wondering if this next one would be the blow that sent a big section of the bridge into collapse. After a while, chunks of concrete started hanging down by the metal threads that ran through the platform.

I also noticed that after a couple of days, there was a big empty section between the concrete barriers at the top of the slope, and the part of the bridge where the steel rafters extended up. It reminded me of the movie &uot;Speed.&uot; I wondered if I could drive up there and jump the car over the gap onto the middle section of the bridge. Probably not. That scene in the movie was pretty implausible, and I have a Camry, not a bus, so I probably wouldn’t even make it past the concrete barriers.

(Note: I am not suggesting that anybody try this. The Tribune shall not be responsible if some dimwit actually tries to jump the bridge.)

Well, I don’t know how much longer this noise is going to last, but I would guess it will stop soon, once the whole bridge is down. I’m told it will be loud again when they start driving the pilings for the new bridge. I remember that from the East Main bridge projects last year; it was kind of a loud CHINK! CHINK! as the big machine whacked the things into the ground.

It has been kind of annoying to have the house shake and to hear the noise all day, but I felt like I gained a little insight in the process.

As I stood watching the bridge come down, listening to the racket and feeling the vibrations through the earth, I more fully realized that it must have been an amazing scene of mayhem at the World Trade Center Sept. 11. This little bridge coming down was shaking my whole neighborhood; imagine the earth-rattling noise that must have erupted when those gigantic towers fell. People have said you just can’t comprehend the WTC site unless you’ve seen it in person; TV just doesn’t do it justice. It must have been the same with the sounds and sensations New Yorkers experienced that day; seeing it on TV didn’t relay it to me, but if my neighborhood was shaken by something as small as the bridge, it must have seemed like the end of the world in New York on Sept. 11.