Cedar Crossing Bridge

The Cedar Crossing Bridge carries Deardorff Road over Johnson Creek in Portland, and is the only covered bridge in Multnomah County, Oregon's most populous county, making it a rare urban entry in a statewide inventory dominated by rural crossings. Built in 1982, the 60-foot structure rests on abutments dating to 1936 from an earlier bridge at the same site, and replaced a deteriorated older wooden truss bridge there. Unlike nearly every other bridge in Oregon's covered bridge collection, Cedar Crossing is explicitly noted by the Oregon Department of Transportation as "not a true covered bridge," since it is a deck-girder structure built without any timber truss for structural support, its covering added purely for nostalgic and aesthetic effect rather than engineering necessity. Design touches include five large windows per side, a knotty-pine interior finish, a 24-foot roadway, and a separate five-foot pedestrian walkway. As a modern structure without genuine historic truss engineering, it carries no National Register of Historic Places listing. A 2015 investigative report in The Oregonian drew public attention to graffiti, trash, standing water on the walkway, and apparent bullet holes, prompting a debate over maintenance of the county's sole covered bridge; Portland's Bureau of Transportation had rated it in fair-to-good structural condition as of 2014. The bridge remains open to vehicle traffic today.