Railroad bridge superstructure is a lovely Art Deco design

To The Daily Sun,

Your second article on the Weirs bridge replacement project (Saturday, Nov. 10) made corrections to your first article (Friday, Nov. 9), but still left some inaccuracies in place and omitted some information that would be of interest to the people of Laconia. Your article states that Jim Thurston “pointed out that the 18-mile detour is actually a 36-mile round trip for someone living on Tower Hill who (sic) wants to go to the Weirs Post Office across the channel.” It was actually Charlie St. Clair who brought up that issue.

Also, I attended the meeting and raised two issues that were completely disregarded in the articles.

The first of these is that the bridge superstructure, dating from 1930, is a lovely Art Deco design. (It does not show itself to advantage in the photo in your article.) So few utilitarian structures designed in current times are given that much artistic consideration, and Laconia has few structures that preserve the Art Deco aesthetic. We are losing a rare piece of the Laconia artistic history — as we must — but it is good that the developers are concerned with providing a visually pleasing replacement. I urge everyone to go look at this bridge, a simple utilitarian guardrail, which they have driven and walked past for decades without really looking at it.

The second issue is the archaeology of the area where the short detour for emergency vehicles is routed. I asked: What is known, what has been published about the archaeological finds underlying that route, and what is being done to protect them? The response was not entirely encouraging. The committee assured me that there would not be any digging or any disturbance below the surface, and that, anyway, pots had already been recovered and stored in historical collections. But the archaeology of a people is not just in its pots. (That is only the stuff that people sell.) It is in the delicate contexts that could be destroyed by the passage of heavy vehicles — hearths, postholes, burial grounds — which truly document the habitation patterns of an ancient people. The good news is that most of the route is over ground that is already paved. The short section that is not paved will be covered by a removable surface that preserves the drainage, but provides no structural protection.

We pray for few emergencies in the Weirs in the month of April. Anyway.

Jane Whitehead, Chair

Laconia Heritage Commission