Join us on Sunday, September 8th from 2pm to 3:30pm at the Pacific Maritime Heritage Center for a Yaquina Bay Bridge Panel Discussion. This is a free program.
Celebrating Ninety Years of Newport’s Yaquina Bay Bridge: In 1934, construction began on the last five bridges designed to close the remaining watery gaps on Oregon’s Highway 101. The last one to open in summer of 1936, the Yaquina Bay Bridge was celebrated for both its beauty and its contribution to the coast’s accessibility for commerce and tourism. In this ninety-minute program, a panel of three state experts explore the bridge’s significance as a Depression-era project, an example of state bridge engineer Conde McCullough’s design excellence, and its preservation into the twenty-first century. Judith Kenny, Oregon Associate from the Living New Deal, will introduce a short, eight-minute film titled In Landscape Harmony: New Deal Bridges for the Oregon Coast. Robert Hadlow, author of Elegant Arches, Soaring Spans: C.B. McCullough, Oregon’s Master Bridge Builder will comment on bridge designer Conde McCullough’s aesthetic and transportation legacy. Bringing the discussion into the present, Oregon State Bridge Engineer and author of Bridges of the Oregon Coast Ray Bottenberg will talk about the future of the Yaquina Bay Bridge and the bridges of Oregon’s coastal highway.
Judith T Kenny, PhD. Oregon Associate, Living New Deal
After retiring as a professor of Geography and Urban Studies from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee (1990-2012), Judith returned to her home state of Oregon to reacquaint herself with the state’s landscape and history. Given her parents’ stories of Depression era rural Oregon, she was drawn to work for the national non-profit, the Living New Deal. For more than ten years, Judith has traveled the state’s highways and forest tracks to document New Deal sites in every one of its thirty-six counties. Recently, she became producer of a video series, “Mapping New Deal Oregon,” to capture further Oregon’s New Deal legacy.
Robert W. Hadlow, Ph.D., Senior Historian, Oregon Department of Transportation
Robert W. Hadlow is the senior historian with the Oregon Department of Transportation, where he completes Section 106 and Section 4(f) documentation for highway and rail projects. He prepared a National Historic Landmark nomination for the Columbia River Highway Historic District (designated in 2000). The Oregon State University Press published his book-length biography of Conde B. McCullough in 2001, Elegant Arches, Soaring Spans: C. B. McCullough, Oregon’s Master Bridge Builder. When he is not pursuing transportation history, you might see him out on the backroads around Portland driving his 1939 Buick Roadmaster.
Ray Bottenberg, PE, SE is the State Bridge Engineer at Oregon Department of Transportation.
A 1986 mechanical engineering graduate of Oregon State University, Ray worked as an aircraft structures engineer for The Boeing Company in Seattle, Washington from 1986 to 1997 and worked as a project manager/engineer for a commercial/industrial heating, ventilating, and air conditioning contractor before joining ODOT in 1999. At ODOT he started in Bridge Design in 2001, moved into Bridge Preservation in 2003, eventually becoming the Bridge Preservation Unit Manager, and then State Bridge Engineer. In his spare time he has authored several local history books, including “Bridges of the Oregon Coast” and “Bridges of Portland”.
