ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Uncovered and bare, its wooden clothing cast aside, as its original wooden beams lay on the ground.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
Bogert’s Covered Bridge, Lehigh County’s oldest, is in midst of a new 2.6 million dollar grant funded overhaul.<\/p>\n
“It is a beautiful bridge, but it is a bridge that does need work,” Allentown Mayor Matt Tuerk said in September.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A slow and steady process, said Tolino.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“It’s a very early bridge from that time period when the economy was transitioning from pre-industrial to industrial,” said Scott Bomboy.<\/p>\n
Bomboy is chair of the Bucks County Covered Bridge Society, and says the style’s now coveted aesthetics arrived over time.<\/p>\n
In 1800, the country’s first was built in Philadelphia, 1500 once covered the state.<\/p>\n
Only 217 are left in Pennsylvania, including Bogert’s.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
When uncovering the past is a bridge to the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Uncovered and bare, its wooden clothing cast aside, as its original wooden beams lay on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[214,232,153,155,154],"class_list":{"0":"post-76576","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-bethlehem","8":"tag-_homepage_top_stories","9":"tag-allentown-area","10":"tag-bethlehem","11":"tag-bethlehem-headlines","12":"tag-bethlehem-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}