If you want an idea of how key to Baltimore the Francis Scott Key Bridge is, here are some photos to remind you:
Baltimore Harbor. Note the Francis Scott Key Bridge, above the middle.
On the right is the Francis Scott Key Bridge, also known in its time as the Car Strangled Spanner. It was dropped by the MV Dali container ship. Note that these ships all load and unload on the far side of the bridge at many docking sites. All need to thread the eye of the bridge’s needle.
This view shows the whole span of the bridge, from the north side to the south, across the mouth of the harbor.
Those three are among six I’ve posted on Flickr for the sole purpose of making them useful. Such as now, twelve years after I shot them. Because yesterday an errant cargo ship, the MV Dali, brought the bridge down by taking out the southwest support column (left side in this view) for the central span, killing at least six people and leaving the “Car Strangled Spanner” out of commission for the next few years.
Like all my other public photos, these are Creative Commons licensed to require only attribution. I see this as the infrastructure of public photography supporting the infrastructures of journalism and archivy.*
Photographically, they aren’t great. But they are free, so if you’re writing about the bridge and want an easy photo to use, have at ’em.
*Meaning (if you skip that link) “the discipline of archives.” For the practice of creating and maintaining archives, I prefer archivery, and would have used it here if a search for that word hadn’t suggested archivy instead.
