The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge is one of the main points of access to downtown Washington, D.C., from I-295 and the Suitland Parkway.

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Spring is in the air, and with it comes the start of the baseball season. In the nation’s capital, the Washington Nationals are in their fourth year of bringing baseball back to the city after more than 35 years, and their first in its new ballpark, the $611 million Nationals Park.

Needless to say, the addition of a major league sports venue at the corner of South Capital and N streets in the district will cause major changes to the traffic in that area. One example of the change is Corman Construction’s work on the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, which continues South Capital Street over the Anacostia River.

The bridge used to bring the street 15 feet above ground level past the site where Nationals Park now stands, making for an uninviting gateway to the ballpark and the neighborhood. Project Manager Chase Cox explains the $27 million project Corman was tasked with included bringing the street to grade as well as rehabbing the bridge.

“There was a lot of structural rehab that needed to be done,” Cox says. The bridge was originally constructed in the late 1940s.

The project was a definite challenge for Corman, a Maryland-based heavy civil contractor, but Cox says the company and its primary design partner RK&K were more than up to the task. Despite the unfamiliar situations and tight timeframe, the company was able to bring the project in ahead of schedule. Cox says this is the kind of work Corman is known for, along with “our concentration on safety, our concentration on planning and managing our costs and trying to be proactive in finding solutions for the clients that we work for.”

The Work Order
The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge is one of the main points of access to downtown Washington, D.C., from Interstate 295 and the Suitland Parkway, carrying more than 77,000 commuters every day. Cox says Corman’s direct involvement with the project made for a much smoother planning process.

“For something like the Frederick Douglass Bridge, which was a design/build project, we spent nine months before with everybody involved, from the designers to our superintendents to the engineers going through the iterations of the plans themselves,” he says.

The project involved a complete rehab of the bridge, as well as the creation of an at-grade intersection at its northern end. “The main part of the job was about 1,200 feet of the bridge was raised over South Capital Street, and that was to be removed and a new approach had to be built,” Cox says.

Those 1,200 feet of the bridge were demolished and a new roadway constructed, complete with aggregate sidewalks. In order to bring the end of the bridge down into the at-grade intersection, Corman had to lower four spans of the bridge into a new configuration for a ramp. “The bridge work was pretty typical for us,” Cox says. “The lowering aspect was definitely new for us.”