New Mississippi River Bridge Plans Finally Being Carried Out

There are four major bridges that cross the Mississippi River at St. Louis. The Eads Bridge is the oldest and most historic. It is a combined road and railway bridge and also carries the Metro Link train across the river into East St. Louis, Illinois. The bridge was the first in several ways. It was the first to use steel as its primary construction material and the first to be built using cantilever construction methods. It was also one of the first to make use of pneumatic caissons. They are still some of the deepest ever built and were responsible for an outbreak of "caisson disease" otherwise known as the "bends." During the construction of the bridge some 15 workers were killed and 77 others were injured.

The Poplar Street Bridge or the "popular street bridge" as many St. Louis folks say it, was completed in 1967. It was planned to handle the extra-anticipated traffic that would be generated by the Gateway Arch. It is by far and away the busiest downtown bridge, carrying some 120,000 vehicles daily, and may be the busiest bridge on the Mississippi River. It is a steel girder bridge with eight lanes of traffic. I remember how much of a pain it was to cross. The lane markers were confusing and you could easily end up crossing the river several times if you got in the wrong lane and the traffic was heavy. Then they finally changed some of the lanes and the signs a few years ago.

I used to ride over to Illinois over the old MacArthur Bridge with my stepfather several times a week. It was a narrow bridge that wasn't very well maintained. There was a monster curve at one end of it and you could sometimes see daylight through the roadbed. It's a truss bridge that is one of the oldest, opened in 1917. Today it has been repaired and is used exclusively for rail traffic.

The McKinley Bridge is also a steel truss bridge. It opened in 1910 and was closed in 2001. It has since been reopened for pedestrians and bicycle traffic. It was the first bridge to extend historic Route 666 across the river.