Did you know there is a bridge in downtown Sandpoint where you can shop, eat, and browse local art without ever leaving the span? The Cedar Street Bridge crosses Sand Creek for 400 feet between First Avenue and the old railroad depot, and its covered marketplace is living heritage in the truest sense: a working piece of 19th-century Sandpoint that reinvented itself instead of disappearing.
The crossing came first, long before the shops. A simple footbridge of logs and decking served the young town in the late 1800s, and historical accounts date an early footbridge here to around 1892. Flooding was a recurring problem for that low bridge. In the early 1900s, local businessman L. D. Farmin had a sturdier bridge built, designed with a wagon lane alongside a pedestrian walkway, and in 1933 the bridge was upgraded so automobiles could reach the train depot across Sand Creek.
When rail travel faded, the bridge faded with it. In 1971 it was blocked to traffic because the structure was no longer safe, and through the late 1970s it sat in disuse with structural damage and holes in its surface. By April 1980 the city had condemned it, and officials were debating whether to tear the derelict bridge down altogether.
That debate is where the story turns. Local entrepreneur Scott Glickenhaus leased the condemned bridge from the city for one dollar a year and rebuilt it in the image of the Ponte Vecchio, the famous shop-lined bridge in Florence, Italy. New pilings were driven into Sand Creek, and the new structure rose from massive tamarack timbers harvested in Idaho and Montana. In May 1983 the Cedar Street Bridge opened as a marketplace, filled with cart vendors, an artisan's corner, bookstores, jewelers, and boutiques.
The bridge kept evolving. In 1988 a small Sandpoint mail-order company, Coldwater Creek, leased a small street-level space for its first retail shop in the country. The company grew so quickly that by 1995 it had leased the entire bridge, and it stayed until 2005, when it moved to a larger downtown home. A new ownership group bought the bridge in 2006 and put more than a million dollars into renovations and repairs.
Today the Cedar Street Bridge remains what Glickenhaus imagined: a gathering place as much as a crossing, often described as the only marketplace on a bridge in the United States. Its shops and vendors have changed many times, and owners have come and gone, but the bridge still does the job it was first built for, joining downtown to the depot side of Sand Creek. On your next trip down from Schweitzer, walk the span slowly. Few landmarks let you stand inside the history you came to see.