The Key Bridge is gone. A new Baltimore Harbor bridge will do more than cross over water.

When I was 10, my family moved to Ocean City north of the bridge.

It was the only way into town at the time, and even after a slender, white ribbon of a bridge opened a few years later, the concrete slab at the eastern end of Route 50 remained the Ocean City bridge in almost everyone’s mind.

That was still true even after it was named for the bombastic, white-belt-and-shoes mayor I covered in my first reporting job, Harry Kelley. Maybe it was the Ocean City drawbridge by then to some. I don’t know what they call it today.

I’ve spent far more time close to the Spa Creek bridge in Annapolis — that’s the Eastport bridge if you cross it right to left. Built years apart, the Ocean City and Annapolis bridges differ in details the way sisters born of the same parents — World War II and the Roosevelt administration — might.

A popular .05 K run across the bridge returns May 11, and for once I’ll be in town. I hope to “compete” in this least strenuous of races.

Bridges are symbols, and not just for me. They link two points of land, sure, but they also connect the imagination.

When Maryland and the feds begin building a new crossing of Baltimore’s outer harbor where the Francis Scott Key Bridge once stood, engineers, bureaucrats and bigwigs would be wise to remember the power of symbolism. A bridge is always more than it seems.

There has been talk of building a temporary modular structure to close the transportation gap ripped open when the Key Bridge collapsed after being struck by a massive container ship that lost power on March 26.

Great, good. Do that.

But the permanent replacement should be more than what was lost.

The Francis Scott Key Bridge is gone. What comes next will not be another Key Bridge in name or memory. It will be the outer Baltimore Harbor bridge, although that unlovely name won’t survive long.

It can frame the city as the Golden Gate Bridge does for San Francisco or the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia. It should draw a line around a new Baltimore, a city of waterways stretching from Bear Creek in the north to Curtis Creek in the south, the Middle Branch in the west and the Inner Harbor downtown.

It will encompass the port and the city we know, but also the Baltimore Peninsula and the restored Middle Branch now taking shape. There is vacant federal land sitting just south of the city in Glen Burnie waiting for a purpose and places like Dundalk to the north, ready for a better future.

Cities are defined by their bridges. Annapolis has the Spa Creek bridge, but also the Ridgely Avenue Bridge tucked away in a quiet corner of the city. The Weems Creek and College Creek bridges carry Rowe Boulevard toward the State House and downtown Annapolis, and tiny pedestrian bridges connect neighborhoods over shaded streams far from the famous waterfront.

Some of the most fun I’ve had as a journalist was needling the State Highway Administration over its failure to make the lights work on the Naval Academy Bridge. It’s an artful sweep of steel, brick and asphalt that crosses the Severn River east of Route 50.

It replaced a historic drawbridge after an innovative competition chose the design, lighted from above and below with graceful, art deco fixtures that echoed buildings at the academy.

Except they didn’t, blinking out by the ones, twos and half-dozens.

When the SHA finally got lights on the bridge deck to stay on, they cheered the accomplishment — but quietly gave up on illuminating the arches holding the roadway above the channel.

New York is another city of bridges, none more famous than the Brooklyn Bridge.

It carries cars and trucks over the East River, but also thousands of pedestrians eager to take in a glorious design that changed America’s brashest city into something more than just the island of Manhattan.

It is a city of boroughs, and although there are plenty of reasons Baltimore would not want to be like New York, New York (so arrogant, they named it twice), it is undeniably a manifestation of the opportunity for greatness that defines America.

When the new Baltimore Harbor bridge opens, it should accommodate people who want to walk or bike across it and create a path for regional mass transit.

That’s already something Anne Arundel County leaders want in a future replacement of the Bay Bridge near Annapolis. Today, you can cross it once a year in a 10K event that attracts lovers of bridges, sweeping views and the novelty of crossing something enormous.

Both are years in the future. Both must acknowledge that people use bridges, not cars and trucks, and will connect not just points of land across a body of water but also people who live and work on opposite shores.

Travel west in Maryland and you can admire the Casselman bridge in Garrett County. It opened in the 1810s, as part of the nation’s early federal transportation projects.

The National Road was intended to knit the eastern states with the burgeoning Ohio Valley across the Appalachians.

The Casselman bridge is beautiful, so much so that my son felt he had to skateboard across its single vaulted arch as a teenager. But so is the Charles W. Cullen Bridge near Bethany Beach.

A 2,600-foot-long cable stayed bridge, its design keeps the entire structure out of the corrosive saltwater that whips through the inlet connecting the Atlantic Ocean and Indian River. It rises above the mist at night, bathed in bright electric colors from spotlights on either shore.

My wife and I got engaged next to the Pont de l’Archevêché in Paris and crossed the River Liffey on the Ha’penny Bridge in Dublin. We’ve walked the Ponte Vecchio, a medieval bridge stacked with ancient shops over the Arno in Florence, Italy. We jet-skied under the West Venetian Causeway linking Miami with Miami Beach.

The names of rivers I’ve driven over are an incantation of past travels — the South and Severn, Monongahela and Ohio, the Potomac, Mississippi and the Colorado. Whether sweating with my brother in his college-era Plymouth Fury III or packed into a family-friendly Honda Pilot with my wife and young kids, the bridges were part of the magic.

I’ve looked down into the blue of the Chesapeake and San Francisco bays from the gray and red suspension spans that help define them.

No bridge, though, feels as much like home as the Spa Creek bridge.

I go out of my way to cross it, admiring the sunset over its headwaters in winter or boats of all kinds that fill the short stretch to the Severn and the Chesapeake in summer.

Maybe that’s what we should remember most as public discussion inevitably turns from recovery to rebuilding in Baltimore.

No matter what the new bridge looks like, or when it opens, someone will be driving across it and thinking the same words that cross my mind whenever I wait for the drawbridge to go down in Annapolis.

I’m home.

Rick Hutzell

rick.hutzell@thebaltimorebanner.com

Rick Hutzell is the Annapolis columnist for The Baltimore Banner. He writes about what's happening today, how we got here and where we're going next. The former editor of Capital Gazette, he led the newspaper to a Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the 2018 mass shooting in its newsroom.

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