Mackinac Bridge celebrates 50 years linking state

Francis X. Donnelly / The Detroit News

ST. IGNACE, Mich. -- Despite its linear shape, the Mackinac Bridge presents a maze of contradictions. It's an inanimate object that moves, rising and sinking, expanding and contracting, gaining and losing weight.

It's one of Michigan's greatest icons but hasn't been seen by most residents.

By joining two peninsulas, it finally made the state whole, yet each part still feels distant from the other.

Despite the mixed messages, there will be nothing muddled about the celebration of the bridge's 50th birthday Thursday. Mighty Mac remains a daring feat of technology, producing a marriage of art and engineering seldom repeated in the half-century since, said architects and residents.

"It's so graceful looking," said Patti Jenkins, 34, a tourist from Grand Rapids who had just spied the bridge through a coin-operated viewer at a scenic turnout in St. Ignace. "You just want to take a picture."

Located atop the Lower Peninsula, the bridge's lyrical weave of steel cables resemble a harp. By night, its twinkling lights shimmer like a diamond necklace.

On a recent day, its twin towers disappeared into the clouds, evoking a celestial aura. The towers reach 46 stories above the water, which is three-quarters of the Renaissance Center's height.

It's the first and last thing Larry Rubin sees every day.

"It's beautiful, enduring, an inspiration," he said.

Rubin, 94, oversaw its construction as the first executive secretary of the Mackinac Bridge Authority. After holding the job 34 years, he retired in 1984 to a home on a St. Ignace bluff overlooking the span.

Crossing the Mackinac, which connects St. Ignace and Mackinaw City, feels a little like driving over an ocean.

It's not just the length, which, at five miles, makes it one of the longest suspension bridges in the world.

Most bridges cross placid water, but the Mackinac spans the turbulent Straits of Mackinac, which, ocean-like, kick up waves of six feet.

Bridge defied critics

Decades in planning and years in building, the Mackinac Bridge defied nature, public opinion and political resistance.

In the 1950s, some engineers thought it would be too difficult to construct such a long bridge in such a weather-beaten locale.

Others wondered why such a barren area needed a bridge. Five ferries carting cars between St. Ignace and Mackinaw City were sufficient, they said.

The Bridge to Nowhere, they dubbed it.

The 2,500 tradesmen who built the Mackinac learned first-hand about the harsh climes.

Every day on the high iron carried the same forecast: cold, misty and windy. With gusts up to 60 mph, the wind chill could reach 50 below. They wore long underwear in the middle of summer.

For 3 ½ years, ironworkers like J.C. Stilwell climbed 550 feet with 40-pound belts lugging hammers, wrenches, bolts and steel rivets.

"You were risking your life a lot of the time," he said. "I met some of the roughest men in the world."

Most of the workers are dead now. The ones Stilwell, 78, of Mackinaw City, remembers best are those who went first, the five who died during construction. He thinks about them every time he crosses the bridge.

In the end, it was a triumph of men over nature. Rarely has a bridge leapt over so much water.

The workers strung 42,000 miles of wire and pounded 5 million rivets. The two-foot-thick cables hold 12,580 wires.

When the bridge opened in November 1957, it put the ferries and their 400 workers out of business. Among them was Mickey Sweeney, captain of the Vacationland ferry.

Sweeney was 40 when he lost his job. When his son Bob turned 40 five years ago, he became executive secretary of the Mackinac Bridge Authority.

"It's one of the few things of this size in such a rural setting," Bob Sweeney said. "I give thanks to those from 50 years ago."

'It takes my breath away'

Some people are afraid to drive over the bridge because of its height.

When they learn that the span moves to accommodate the wind, making it 1 million tons of writhing steel and concrete, they're even less inclined to cross the incline.

But they're small in number and not the reason why the Mackinac is traveled so much less than other big bridges.

Last year 4.1 million vehicles crossed the bridge. The Golden Gate hosts that many in six weeks while the George Washington in New York sees that many in two weeks.

Fewer people traverse the Mackinac because it's so far from everyone. The closest big city, Detroit, is 300 miles away.

So Michigan doesn't get much of a chance to flaunt one of its greatest man-made objects.

But some residents are lucky enough to see it all the time.

"It always takes my breath away," said Janet Smart, 67, a retired Ford secretary from Mackinaw City.

When the Mackinac was first unveiled, it was seen as a 5-mile metaphor.

Michigan's peninsulas, separate for 120 years, would be joined. Lion and Packer fans would finally be one.

But little has changed in the half-century since.

The Upper Peninsula looks a lot like it did in the 1950s, a land of pasties and Finnish accents. Its population, 316,000, has barely budged in half a century.

Like a time machine, the Mackinac Bridge takes travelers from the south and transports them to an earlier era.

The bridge, a technological wonder, remains a 21st Century entrance to the 19th.

You can reach Francis X. Donnelly at (313) 223-4186 or fdonnelly@detnews.com.