(upbeat music) - So it's Wilkes-Barre 1816, James Madison is President of the United States, King George III is still King of England, and Jesse Fell is the Burgess, which we now call mayor, of Wilkes-Barre.

And in that year, the State of Pennsylvania incorporated the Wilkes-Barre Bridge Company to build one of four Market Street Bridges that would span the Susquehanna over the past 200 years.

The very, very first bridge was a wooden-covered bridge.

It started in 1806 when the borough of Wilkes-Barre was incorporated and took over the management of a ferry.

Where you see the bridge today, a ferry used to shuttle people back and forth from Wilkes-Barre to Kingston.

Took 'em about five, 10 years, five to 10 years, to raise enough capital to get the bridge started.

By 1816, they had enough money, $47,000 to be exact, to build the first wooden Market Street Bridge.

Sad to say though, that bridge had a calamity in 1824 and a wind knocks the bridge, enormous wooden bridge knocked off of its piers.

And took 'em two more years to rebuild it.

So that's the second Market Street Bridge.

That bridge was in operation until 1892 when competition from another bridge in Wilkes-Barre, by the Wilkes-Barre and Kingston Bridge Company, started in 1888, and built one from Pierce Street to North Street, just above us.

The Wilkes-Barre Bridge Company said, "We gotta get our act together and come up with a new modern, steel trestle bridge."

And that bridge was an operation from 1892 until the current bridge you see in 1929.

In 1921, Fred Morgan Kirby donated land for Kirby Park to the city of Wilkes-Barre.

In 1926, he chose the architectural firm of Carrere and Hastings of New York, well-known for their work of the New York Public Library and the Frick Collection, both on Fifth Avenue.

This monumental bridge was previously designed by Thomas Atherton, a young Wilkes-Barre architect, starting out at the firm of Carrere and Hastings, and he modeled the bridge after the very famous Parisian bridge, Pont Alexandre, (speaks in French) just up the way from Eiffel tower.

It is a wonderful bridge with four pylons, four eagles, a span of 12 piers measuring 1600 feet, and costing $2.5 million.

If you look on the bridge below the four eagles, they are inscribed with different virtues that all begin with the letter P: perseverance, patriotism, progress, and prosperity.

All symbols that we need to learn still today to keep our society going.

The bridge was, believe it or not, a toll bridge for very many, many years.

And by 1909, the tolls ceased when the Wilkes-Barre Bridge Company went out of business by selling the bridge to Luzerne County.

I think it's really important that we pay homage to our early historians.

Constance Reynolds, one month after this bridge opened, wrote a wonderful, definitive history of all the Market Street Bridges.

And she writes, in her ending paragraph, "It is a bridge to which one and all may point with pride, not view with alarm.

It is a monument in which narrow sexualism should be lost, while realizing the useful beauty of this structure that belongs to all of us.

May it be a monument to the dauntless courage and fortitude of that pioneer bridge company, to their progressiveness, service, and patriotism.

Let us never forget that it represents an historic, old landmark and knowing the difficulties that has been surmounted in building these four bridges, let us fully appreciate this fourth one.

It is the growth of our Wyoming Valley that we see in the growth of our bridges.

Since the first settlers came here, man has fought to cross the turbulent river.

The bridge has symbolized man's battle for commerce, growing and enlarging, always moving forward.

Those other bridges told of a flourishing nature of the local settlement.

This new bridge points to a new era of the progressiveness of the valley's history."

(upbeat music)