WVXU's Round the Corner series takes you into the heart of Greater Cincinnati's communities. This time, we're getting to know Covington and the communities around the Brent Spence Bridge.
More than 60 years ago, Bill Basham was in a hole beneath the bed of the Ohio River.
He and a handful of other ironworkers were using steel rods to build the frame of the Brent Spence Bridge's piers and nervously watching the corners of the pit around them.
Metal walls and pumps in those corners were all that separated them from the relentless river.
"They had four 12-inch water pumps," he says. "If one went out, they'd tell you, 'Start getting out.' Water still bubbled up from the bottom. But they'd tell us, 'Don't worry about the bubbles.' "
Basham and his coworkers were working on the support beams that would eventually hold 207 million pounds of concrete and steel 211 feet above the Ohio River.
Working atop concrete pads poured 57 feet below the riverbed, they were building the foundation of a span that now carries two highways and 160,000 vehicles a day across its two decks. The support structure Basham was working on would end up using one million pounds of steel.
RELATED: When is construction on the Brent Spence companion bridge going to start?
In the decades after Basham and his fellow workers climbed down into that pit to place all that steel, the bridge has become crowded, carrying twice the 80,000 cars a day it was designed for. Officials have debated what to do to solve the problem.
Now, solutions are coming into focus, and a new companion bridge is on the horizon. As designs are drawn up and a workforce is rallied, the workers who built the original bridge are vivid reminders of the sheer human effort needed to make something so enormous.
'It's a good feeling'
Construction work on the bridge started in January 1961, during a time when urban renewal and highway projects were remaking America's cities.
The bridge itself cost about $5 million (roughly $51.5 million in today's dollars), Kentucky Department of Highways District Engineer C. O. Yochum told newspapers at the time. The approaches on the Kentucky and Ohio sides were another $5 million together. The federal government paid 90% of that cost, with Kentucky contributing 9% and Ohio chipping in the final 1%.
Officials named the bridge for Newport, Ky.-born Congressman Brent Spence. Some briefly suggested naming it for recently assassinated President John F. Kennedy, an idea Spence said he supported. But JFK's name eventually went to a bridge in Louisville instead.
Before all that, though, workers had to build the bridge.
Mike Kelsch was down in the pit with Basham. Kelsch has been part of a lot of projects along the river — Lytle Tunnel; Riverfront Stadium (now gone and replaced by Great American Ball Park); the Colosseum (now Heritage Bank Arena). But he says the Brent Spence was a unique experience.
He remembers riding a barge to the worksite early in the morning and climbing a ladder down into the river to weld. They spent long days there building the skeleton of the bridge's piers.
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"I can remember it was dark a lot of times when we'd come out of the hole because we'd stay late and try to get stuff done," he says.
After workers like Kelsch and Basham finished in the depths building the bridge's piers, others scaled the heights to put together the 9,000 tons of structural steel making up the iconic bridge's superstructure. The work took something like 670,000 rivets, newspapers reported at the time.
Leroy Oberding of Fort Thomas, Ky., was up on the high steel as a connector — a tough job that involved literally piecing the bridge together.
"They send the iron up and you put enough pins and bolts in it to let it stand there until the bolt-up crew comes along and bolts it up," he explains.
From the archives: The fiery crash in 2020 that closed the Brent Spence Bridge
Joe Kyle of Erlanger, Ky., was another of those workers connecting the steel beams high above the river.
He says working on the bridge was exhilarating.
"You look down, you've got the river, and you see the birds flying underneath of you," he recalls. "You see the black smoke coming out of that crane, and here comes that big hunk of steel up. And it was huge. It was a good feeling, like you accomplished something, you really did something. Ten-ton piece of iron and I whipped it."
It wasn’t all good times, though. Both Kyle and Oberding say they remember the day an ironworker from Pittsburgh fell off the bridge while riveting pieces of steel together. WVXU couldn't find news coverage of the incident, but both Kyle and Oberding told the story independently of each other. Kyle tells the tale as he remembers it.
"Right off the top deck, right through the bottom — didn't hit nothing, right down through," he says. "He missed a barge from here to the wall. He hit on his hands and knees on the water, so he broke it very well. It wasn't like a belly buster. He was back at work the next day — just shook him up a bit."
All four retired ironworkers take immense pride in what they helped build and say they're very pleased the bridge will remain standing instead of being torn down. Kelsch, who helped build the piers, predicts it still has a long life ahead.
"There's nothing wrong with it," he says. "It'll go another hundred years."
RELATED: Why does Kentucky own the Ohio River?
Oberding, the connector, is 84 now. He says he'd still like to work on bridges.
"I was going to work on the next one, too, but I don't guess I'll make it," he laughs.
Instead, it'll be the next generation doing the work, many likely from Ironworkers Local 44 based in Hebron, Ky. Kyle, Oberding, Kelsch and Basham all had roughly the same words of advice for them: take pride in your work — and be very careful.