For nearly 500 weeks, our Friday Flashbacks have covered every category imaginable.
Old stores, Bygone restaurants. Famous fires. Memorial Day parades. The Italian Festival. And plenty of beach scenes.
We identify all of them. Sometimes we give a complete or incomplete history. Sometimes we ask readers to fill in the blanks.
But we’ve never had absolutely no clue what a particular image showed.
Until today.
Seth Schachter bought this postcard online.
It does not look like any bridge we’ve ever seen.
Was it an artist’s embellishment of an existing bridge somewhere? A concept that was never constructed? Or perhaps it’s mislabeled, and “The Old Bridge” was never actually in Westport.
We have no idea.
So we’re counting on you — our readers — to fill in the blanks.
If you know where “The Old Bridge” was labeled, click “Comments” below.
And if you don’t know, but have a clever thought — perhaps related to the current Cribari Bridge controversy — we want to hear from you too.
Help us “bridge” the past, the present and the future.
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Did anyone run this through A-I?
Kings Highway North?
Looks like it could be the original Train bridge over the Saugatuck River looking east, but have never seen this before either.
canal street on the Fort Apache side? the building in the back looks like the little building on the town side.
As others have commented, this could possibly be the previous iteration of the Kings Highway Bridge. It was destroyed by a flood in the 50s. Never seen this particular image before. Nice job, Seth!
Quite possibly the Kings Highway bridge as other have said, but given the vintage of the postcard I’d put this at pre-1900 construction. See the bridge shown on the 1878 map many of us have (https://www.vintagecitymaps.com/product/westport-ct-1878-color//srsltid=AfmBOooulsbO51ZIYgVdiudhm2LS1oNP8Bc3MPQfPYKL7lZlidTdj27d)
Also see the old stone pilings noted in a previous 06880 post which look to align with the postacard (https://06880danwoog.com/tag/kings-highway-bridge/)
the link to the 1878 map didn’t copy correctly, hopefully this works:
https://www.vintagecitymaps.com/product/westport-ct-1878-color/?srsltid=AfmBOooulsbO51ZIYgVdiudhm2LS1oNP8Bc3MPQfPYKL7lZlidTdj27d
I’d also guess that it’s the Kings Highway Bridge. I think that the one washed out in the 1950s flood was red, but maybe the red bridge was even earlier. Great image.
The building in the postcard does not match anything familiar in my memory. Between the bridge and Fort Apache aka Willows, I feel like there is more space but it could be a home on the other side of the river. Without seeing the roadway itself, it is also hard to judge. As a new driver in 1967, I remember all three bridges having slippery steel decks.