bridge

This steel has been in place since the 1950s when the Inner Belt Bridge was built. You can see a video of the construction below. (Plain Dealer file photo)

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A family that grew up in the shadow of the Inner Belt Bridge and documented its construction on film has spliced together hours of home movies to create a 6-minute YouTube video of the bridge going up in the 1950s.

Made from color film shot with a 16-millimeter camera by the father of Bernie Sokolowski, now co-owner of Sokolowski's University Inn, the video gives a unique look at the building of the massive truss-arch span over the Cuyahoga River.

Workers began demolishing the bridge last month as part of a $273 million project that includes construction of a new eastbound Interstate 90 bridge through downtown Cleveland. A new westbound bridge opened in November and will handle traffic in both directions until its sister span is done in 2016.

The Sokolowskis were second-generation owners of the tavern in Cleveland's Tremont area when work started on the first Inner Belt Bridge in 1954. Outside the front door of the neighborhood bar on University Road, Sokolowski's dad, Ben, had a nice spot from which to film the eight-lane, 4,233-foot span as it rose along the edge of downtown.

Sokolowski said family members decided to condense footage of the bridge that figured so much in their life into a single movie. His son Bernard, a graphic artist, put the video together using Apple's Final Cut Pro software. Sokolowski in recent days showed it to customers at the inn's bar.

Now 58 years old, Bernie is a toddler in white shorts in the first seconds of the video, which opens with a shot of a bar patron helping him to stand. The camera pans to the family Doberman pincher, Rita, romping near the edge of a dropoff to a vista of the bridge site, and moves to Bernie's mother, Marion, before cutting away to monumental bridge piers rising on the riverbank.

Ironworkers are shown high up on the steel span without harnesses, looking almost casual as they go about their duties.

"It was a different breed of men that worked on those bridges," Sokolowski said. "These guys, most of them were World War II vets. They'd seen a lot in their day. Going on a bridge was nothing."

Sokolowski's grandfather had bought the bar already named University Inn in 1923. When the bridge was going up, construction workers stopped in on their breaks for a shot and a beer, then headed back to the high beams.

"There probably weren't many regulations on what you could do on your lunch hour," Sokolowski said.

His grandmother, visiting one day from Pennsylvania said, "'Why don't you cook these guys something to eat? They're hungry,'" Sokolowski said. "Next thing you know we started making food, home-made cooking. That's sort of how we transferred from tavern to restaurant."

Sokolowski has few recollections of the actual bridge construction because he was so young. He does remember the huge orange girders.

As an older boy he looked at the bridge out the windows of the restaurant. "I grew up hearing freighters and tug boats blowing the fog horns," Sokolowski said. "It's just been a part of my life."

Workers on the Ohio Department of Transportation project are cutting the concrete deck into six- to eight-foot slabs that are loaded into trucks and hauled away. A controlled demolition this summer will bring down the massive steel skeleton.