Last February, The Leader reported that the Academic Spine Bridge connecting the Williams Center to the steps of Reed Library and McEwen Hall would come down over the course of the summer. Even with months of advance notice, its absence from the Fredonia landscape is startling all the same.
Since it was erected more than four decades ago, the Bridge has been an ever-present companion to Fredonians of all sorts. Many made a habit of walking across it on their daily commute, while many more used it for shelter from various storms. Some whispered at opposite edges of the concave supports underneath, which would then carry their message clearly as can be. Clubs posted their notices on bulletin boards, and somebody once upon a time decorated it with a purple handprint. If nothing else, the Bridge gave us an inescapable feeling of connection, between buildings and each other.
The Blue Devil may be Fredonia’s mascot, but the Bridge was part of the design which gave Fredonia its essential character. In a year where we are embroiled in increasingly nasty elections and divisive debates about Pokémon teams, it’s almost sort of nice to have something to agree on, or it would be if the cost wasn’t so steep. With the Bridge gone, campus now has an inescapable feeling of being slightly askew.
As reported elsewhere in this issue, the Bridge’s absence is not a temporary state for this year’s seniors to gripe about — gone means gone. This is an unfortunate reality that we all must come to accept, just as we accepted months ago that it was too unsafe to keep the Bridge as-is. Both decisions to tear down the Bridge and to not build another have no basis in malice or an unexplainable disgust for architecture, but instead result from financial strain felt across the entire state. As any college student desperately fishing for change in the living room couch knows, sometimes there’s just not enough cash. Without state funding for pedestrian bridges, there simply is no good and realistic alternative.
But there are still other concerns about what the Bridge represented that the University will need to address in the coming months and years, namely the I.M. Pei factor. In 1968, then-president Oscar E. Lanford requested that Pei and his partner, Henry N. Cobb, design the campus’ master plan, giving us not just the Bridge but crucial pieces of the grounds including (but not limited to) the Williams Center, Reed Library and Ring Road. Many of these buildings have been modified or renovated since their original construction; more buildings, including a new Admissions Center in the neighborhood of Three Man Hill, will undoubtedly join them. It is our hope that the University respects the original Pei design as these future projects come to fruition, lest Fredonia lose even more of its identity in the process.