SEATTLE - Call it the South Park Bridge, call it the 14th/16th Street Bridge. Whatever you call it, the people who live and work in the South Park neighborhood call it a lifeline.
For Bob Kent, the man who runs the Tire Factory store at the west end of the bridge, having the bridge replaced is important. A lot of his customers work at Boeing on the other side of the Duwamish River.
"You're going to lose the Boeing traffic in the morning that drops their car off and then walks over the bridge to work," said Kent.
Across the street and a block up, Julia Ramos of Jalisco's Restaurant wonders if this location of her small restaurant chain can stay open as most of the customers during the busy lunchtime rush come from over the bridge.
"If they close, I don't know if we can stay longer here," she said.
South Park is a neighborhood of boatyards and industrial plants. Some Boeing facilities call the place home, along with some 3700 people who live there.
"I'm hopeful something will happen still," said Dagmar Cronn, the president of the South Park Neighborhood Association and resident. "We're right in the middle of a huge, important area economically, for the state, the City of Seattle."
South Park is in the heart of industrial Seattle. Directly across the Duwamish River is Boeing's old corporate headquarters and the plant that built B-17 Bombers for WWII.
The whole area is surrounded by factories and businesses large and small, and many of the vehicles that go over the bridge are trucks. 20,000 vehicles use the bridge everyday, and that traffic has to cross the Duwamish somewhere, most likely over the already busy First Avenue South Bridge farther downstream.
What worries Cronn is that with the South Park Bridge slated to close on June 30, the neighborhood could atrophy during the years it waits for the money to finally come through to build a $150 million replacement. This, she says, just as the neighborhood has been turning itself around.
The decision to close the bridge was reached by the King County Council last fall. In the 2010 budget, it's only funded until June 30.
A bridge safety study is currently underway to determine if it can even last that long, or if its life could be extended a few more months.
The county was hoping to win a $99 million federal stimulus grant to get construction moving. But last month, the county lost out, and right now King County is $123 million short.
