By its nature a bascule bridge has to have somewhere to come down to, and this abutment on the Baltimore & Ohio's line to the Cleveland lakefront was reasonably typical. At this time the Cuyahoga River was still famed for bursting into flames (18 times since 1868, most recently in 1969), due to the incredible amount of chemical waste dumped by the steel industries, refineries and other heavy industries of Cleveland, one of the factors that led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970.
