Harper's Round Table, March 3, 1896

by Various

CRIB IN FOREGROUND, PILES IN SHOAL WATER, AND WALL OF MASONRY IN BACKGROUND.

First, a swarm of bristling, beetlelike mud-dredges anchored along in line just off the shore, and for many weeks their big scoops chunked up and down in the shallow water, each time bringing up with them great masses of black slimy mud. Scows were loaded down to the water's edge by the dredges, and sent off to dump the mud somewhere else where filling was wanted. When they came back, too, they generally towed behind them rafts of loose logs. For months these logs were coming up the river almost every day, and were anchored off the scene of the work. Hundreds of thousands of loose logs were towed up for this work at different times, and just before the crib-work was begun that part of the river looked like a logging camp.

When the dredges had dug a long deep trench in the mud where the outer edge of the roadway was to be, the work of sinking the cribs began. These cribs are made of logs laid crosswise, like old-fashioned log cabins, and fastened together. They were built at a ship-yard, in sections several hundred feet long, and towed up the river to be sunk in the trench. No sooner had they been fastened in place, by a row of piles, than the hordes of workmen began to swarm all over them. The loose logs were hauled up out of the water and laid on the cribs crosswise, and fastened in place with great spikes.

But though the workmen kept on building up the cribs, they did not seem to grow any higher. As fast as the new logs were added the weight carried them down deeper into the water. Finally they were sunk into the mud at the bottom of the trenches by filling them with tons upon tons of broken rocks, and when they were firmly imbedded they were built up to the proper height with more logs.

In some places these cribs are higher than an ordinary city house, and considerably wider at the bottom. Imagine a log cabin bigger than a house, and you have a good idea of what these cribs would look like if entirely out of water. When finally settled in place the outside edges were trimmed with smooth-cut timbers, and the work of filling in began. A little railroad was built along the tops of the sunken cribs and up the side of the hill, where a lot of blasting and digging was going on. Dummy-cars pulled by mules were loaded with rocks and earth, and dumped into the great gap between the cribs and the shore. Many thousands of tons of dirt and rocks were thrown in here before the big opening was filled up.

WHERE THE CRIBS HAVE SLID OUT OF PLACE.

But the engineers had made a serious mistake in planning this part of the boulevard, and the weight of the filling behind them pushed some of the cribs out into the water. Far down under the soft muddy bottom there is hard rock, and this shelves out rapidly toward the middle of the river; so when the great weight was filled in behind the sunken cribs, the mud, cribs and all, slid out in places away from the shore. Some parts have moved as much as eight feet at the top, and apparently much more at the bottom, and before the great speedway can be finished, this work will have to be repaired, and the outer edge moved back out of the channel of the river.

Just below the bridge a great rocky promontory jutted out into the way like a cape, and nearly a hundred thousand cubic yards of rock were blasted away to make room for the boulevard. When the workmen got down to the level of the water, submarine drills had to be used for the blasting. This work, too, was very interesting. Divers in rubber suits with glass eyes were sent down under the water to fix the drills in position, and then the holes were bored from the floats above. When they had been sunk deep enough, the divers went down again and fixed the charges of powder that blasted out the rocks. It was like a small earthquake and water-spout combined when one of these blasts went off.

Down at the lower end of the road the approach winds down the side of the rocky heights. Here it is supported for nearly half a mile on a great stone wall, which gradually grows smaller and smaller as the approach nears the level of the river. At one point another great mass of rock got in the way of the workmen, and they blasted their way right through its centre. The carriages will disappear in this cut as though they had been swallowed up by the rocks, and come out again on the other side as they wind their way down toward the straight part of the road along the river-bank. Over forty thousand cubic yards of rock were cut out of this place alone, and the workmen used all this and much more to fill in the cribs when they sunk them in the river below.