Despite the progress, two pedestrian bridges in Pottstown Park remained closed

The long-awaited replacement bridge over Manatawny Creek in Memorial Park has been built, but needs one more bridge before it can open to the public. (Evan Brandt – MediaNews group)

POTTSTOWN – The announcement Wednesday that the Riverfront Park pedestrian bridge over Manatawny Creek will be closed until the replacement arrives means the two main pedestrian bridges in Pottstown’s two main parks will remain closed for the foreseeable future in the coming weeks.

The other bridge is in Memorial Park.

On Wednesday, the Parks and Recreation Department announced the closure of the Riverfront Park pedestrian bridge. Director Michael Lenhart said a new bridge is being built to replace the one currently there, but it likely won’t be completed before September or October.

Although he planned to leave the current bridge in place until the replacement arrived, he became increasingly concerned about the deteriorating deck of the Riverfront Park bridge. He was there to take a look at it on Wednesday and placed a cone over a part of the deck with a hole big enough to trip over.

The original plan was to renovate the existing bridge, but an analysis found that replacing it would cost only $30,000 more and that a new bridge would have a much longer lifespan than a renovated bridge.

“They are going to do some paving work on the other side of the parking lot to repair the damage caused by the heavy machinery from the first phase of this project, and since we would be closing the bridge for that, I thought it could be done. is a good time to take a closer look at what’s out there,” Lenhart said.

In April, work was done to stabilize the dike along the creek in Riverfront Park, which required heavy earth-moving equipment. But what he saw of the bridge deck before that closer look convinced him to close it now with great caution.

In addition to paving to repair the path from the bridge to the creek’s confluence with the Schuylkill River, the dirt path along the back of the park parallel to College Drive will also be repaired, Lenhart said.

In the meantime, “we have ordered the new bridge, but I can’t say how long it will take to get it done,” Lenhart said.

The total replacement project will cost more than $732,000.

It goes without saying that work on the Memorial Park bridge is much more advanced, even if it has taken much longer to raise the money to pay for the costs.

It took five years to raise the funds to replace the pedestrian bridge in Memorial Park between “Veterans Island” and most of the park after the bridge was destroyed in 2019.

Both projects include strengthening the side of the creek at each bridge.

It wasn’t the bridge that failed during the 2019 storm, “it was the abutment that washed away,” Lenhart said in April. “And remember, that storm delivered four inches of rain in 90 minutes, so hopefully we don’t get another storm like that anytime soon,” he said. This project will also “open up that channel a little bit more” in an effort to reduce flood heights, Lenhart said.

The cost for this bridge replacement is approximately $516,000.

The fact that the bridge will not be available this weekend will likely be a disappointment to many Volleyball Rumble tournament players, as many of them have camped on Veterans Island in recent years.

“We were hoping to have it done by the time the Rumble came around, but now we’ve done it,” Lenhart said. “We’re not even sure if it will be open to the public during the GoFourth celebration, but with the way the fireworks are set off, we don’t want people on the island most of the time anyway,” he said.