Jeremy Cox

The Daily Times

The Chesapeake Bay Bridge turns 65 years old Sunday.

Greeted by equal parts praise and lamentation upon its opening, the 4-mile span forever transformed life on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. But what if it had never been built?

“It set everything into motion," said Linda Duyer, a Salisbury-based historian.

The bridge is so ingrained in the region's economy and culture that it's hard to imagine a world in which it doesn't exist, she added.

The best she could say is that the Shore's cities and towns would be "real isolated," much like they were before Maryland invested in the largest public project in its history.

The question, "What would have come of the Eastern Shore without the two bay-bridging spans?" is no mere rhetorical exercise.

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The region finds itself at a similar crossroads today. The Maryland Transportation Authority last August kicked off a four-year, $5 million study to determine where to build a third span and how to finance it. Authority officials have indicated they're game to look anywhere along the bay within the state's boundaries for a solution, including next to the existing two spans.

The effort has reopened a debate not unlike the one that flared during the four decades leading up to the construction of the first span and continued in its wake.

The emerging consensus, only 65 years in the making, is that much was gained, but something was also lost.

Had the bridge never connected Maryland's western and eastern shores, the communities dotting the eastern half of the state likely would have remained the small, quaint outposts they were during the first half of the 20th century, according to one observer.

Among those sleepy hamlets would be the now-bustling resort of Ocean City, Jim Mathias said.

“I’ve been quoted as saying the two best things that happened to Ocean City in the 20th century are the Bay Bridge and beach replenishment," said Mathias, a state senator and former Ocean City mayor.

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“The only way I would imagine (the bridge) wouldn’t exist is if cars weren’t that big of a deal," Duyer said. "I’m sure that was the driving force, enough to spend that kind of money to build a bridge."

From the time pre-dating European contact to the Civil War, water was the preferred mode of travel. It shaped how people made their living and where they settled down to live; it's no mistake that Salisbury took root at the farthest upstream point of navigation on the Wicomico River.

Then came the railroads, which governed travel and trade until the Great Depression. While some roads crisscrossed the region by mid-century, it wasn't until the opening of the Bay Bridge that highways supplanted other forms of transportation on the Shore, Duyer said.

Along the Shore, the bridge compelled state transportation officials to upgrade old Route 213 into a dualized Route 50. In most communities, such as Cambridge and Easton, the new road bypassed the downtown.

But in Salisbury, the new highway cut a swath between downtown and a neighborhood of Victorian-era homes known as Newtown. (The Salisbury Bypass wouldn't be completed until 2002.)

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The $45 million bridge replaced a ferry that had carried people and vehicles between Sandy Point and Kent Island for decades. The bridge shaved the crossing time from 30 minutes to 6 minutes.

The impact was immediate. In 1951, the last full year of ferry service, an average of 2,494 vehicles a day made the crossing. In 1953, the first full year after the original two-lane bridge opened, that number swelled to 5,295, according to a 1956 study conducted by the precursor to the State Highway Administration.

By 2015, the bridge in its current five-lane configuration hosted 72,000 vehicles a day.

To be sure, life was slower before the bridge.

Jack Broderick, who has lived on Kent Island for more than four decades, remembers taking the ferry as a child.

"It was exciting to me," he said. "You'd get in line. We'd come in (onto the ferry) and get out with the family and get up top and watch the bay and smell the bay. I get butterflies right now just thinking about it."

Broderick commuted across the bridge for years to his job in Washington at the U.S. Defense Department. If not for the convenience of the steel and concrete, he wouldn't have been able to live on that side of the bay, he said.

"You couldn't have a career in Washington like I did and live on the Eastern Shore," he said.

The downside is the crush of traffic the bridge has brought to Queen Anne's County's back roads, particularly during the summer tourism season, said Broderick, who now chairs the Maryland Transportation Authority's Bay Bridge Advisory Group.

If not for the bridge, "the peninsula's commercial orientation would be focused more on Philadelphia," said David Guth, a Talbot County native who has written a book about the bridge's history.

What's more, the region wouldn't have gentrified to the extent that it has, said Guth, now a journalism professor at the University of Kansas.

"I grew up near St. Michaels, which in the '60s was a sleepy town. But now, St. Michaels is a tourist town that caters to the rich and famous. I'm not necessarily saying that's bad, but it is definitely different."

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John Presburg knows exactly what a Bay Bridge-less Eastern Shore would mean for him: no job.

When the Salisbury airport stopped offering direct flights to Baltimore in the early 2000s, Presburg got an idea to transport people across the bay by vehicle. In 2005, Bay Runner Shuttle was born.

Today, the service makes trips to Baltimore-Washington International Airport from the western shore as well. Although Frederick is about the same size and distance from the airport as Easton, the mainland-only trips usually book about 30 percent fewer passengers, he said.

Presburg's theory about the phenomenon is that the Bay Bridge “provides a mental barrier for people driving across the bay where they say, 'I don’t feel like driving over there. I’ll let someone else do it.'"

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On Twitter @Jeremy_Cox

Chesapeake Bay Bridge facts

The first Bay Bridge Walk occurred on April 27, 1975, when a Boy Scout leader in Towson asked then-Governor Marvin Mandel if his troop could walk across the bridge while it was closed for maintenance. Approximately 20,000 people participated in that first event.

In 1952, when the Bay Bridge opened it was a $2.80 roundtrip at a cost of $1.40 each way plus 25 cents for each passenger.

The cost to cross the Bay Bridge today is $2.50 roundtrip with EZPass, less expensive than it was the day the bridge opened 65 years ago. The cash toll is $4.

Maryland plans to spend $290 million in Bay Bridge rehabilitation projects over six years.

Source: Maryland Transportation Authority