ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Uncovered and bare, its wooden clothing cast aside, as its original wooden beams lay on the ground.
“When you go over there, it’s quite shocking. It looks like it’s kind of disassembled,” said Mandy Tolino, Director, of Allentown Parks and Rec.
Bogert’s Covered Bridge, Lehigh County’s oldest, is in midst of a new 2.6 million dollar grant funded overhaul.
“It is a beautiful bridge, but it is a bridge that does need work,” Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk said in September.
Closed since September, the 184-year-old Howe truss and burr arch bridge spans 145 feet across the Lehigh Parkway. It’s getting a new slate roof, rehabbed siding, and a fresh coat of paint, with construction crews currently straightening its sag.
A slow and steady process, said Tolino.
“They are using, like a jack, similar to how you drag up your car. And they do like an inch or so a day to try to slowly do that, to protect that historic wood that’s on the base of the bridge,” she described.
“It’s a very early bridge from that time period when the economy was transitioning from pre-industrial to industrial,” said Scott Bomboy.
Bomboy is chair of the Bucks County Covered Bridge Society, and says the style’s now coveted aesthetics arrived over time.
In 1800, the country’s first was built in Philadelphia, 1500 once covered the state.
Only 217 are left in Pennsylvania, including Bogert’s.
“They were the top line engineering bridges that people used for commerce and for transportation, and that’s important link in history we need to observe,” Bomboy added.
They were the top line engineering bridges that people used for commerce and for transportation, and Bogert’s project is expected to be finished by late summer or early fall.
“Not only is it historic structure, it also is a connection for the trails in the parkway, and a lot of fishermen fish underneath it. So it’s got a lot of benefits that’ll bring to park users in Allentown,” Tolino added.
When uncovering the past is a bridge to the future.