Built St. Louis: Crumbling Landmarks
The MacArthur Bridge

The MacArthur Bridge opened in 1917 as the Municipal Free Bridge (as it was the only one which did not charge a toll), and was renamed in 1942 for the World War II general. For several years it carried Route 66 -- the main drag through the western half of the country -- into Missouri and St. Louis.

The MacArthur's enormous steel trusses and stone piers form a presence that is astonishing to stand beneath, the most powerful and awe-inspiring of the city's bridges. Though not graceful, it commands respect through its sheer size and height (equivalent to a fourteen story building.) It is the product of an age that believed in the promise of infinately bigger and more powerful machines. Appropiately, lumbering freight trains still run regularly on its lower deck today.

I list it as "abandoned" because of the out-of-service upper car deck. The roadway was closed in 1981 due to the estimated six million dollar cost of repairing the roadway, and the long history of cars crashing through its railings at places where the roadway makes sudden jogs.

Reopening MacArthur to car traffic would not solve St. Louis's long-standing trans-Mississippi traffic problems; the car deck is too narrow and twisty to handle heavy loads, and the bridge does not lead to any major streets. But pedestrian and bicycle traffic would be another matter altogether. Routing a bicycle path over the bridge (as is happening further north with the Chain of Rocks Bridge) would be a wonderful innovation in an area that badly needs it. The bridge's upper deck must offer spectacular views of a postcard-worthy perspective of downtown.

The bridge today is owned by Terminal Railroad Association, which is reported to be adamantly opposed to re-opening the car deck. A section of the east approach was removed in 1989 to discourage those attempting to enter the bridge, further decreasing the likelyhood that this spectacular bridge will ever see upper-deck traffic again. The bridge seems strangely detached from the life of the city around it; even the space beneath it -- one of the most humbling in the city -- is little more than a hobo camp and fisherman's site at the south end of the Arch grounds.

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