The Eagle Point Bridge was a very narrow two lane automobile bridge that connected urban Dubuque, Iowa and rural Grant County, Wisconsin. It was part of the US 61/US 151 route, and was a toll bridge. After the new Dubuque-Wisconsin Bridge was built in 1983, the Eagle Point Bridge was torn down. At the end, the toll was ten cents, both ways, collected on the Iowa side.
The bridge was located about 900 feet south of Lock and Dam No. 11, at the northern edge of Rhomberg Avenue in Dubuque, and connected to Eagle Point Road on the opposite side of the river. It was about one mile (2 km) north of the present bridge. The bridge was still structurally sound after the new bridge was built, leading some to ask the bridge be kept open as a pedestrian or special use bridge, but the state of Iowa still tore the bridge down.
Several years after the demolition of the bridge, a restaurant known as the Tollbridge Inn was constructed at what was the Iowa end of the bridge. The restaurant operated for a number of years, until it was torn down to make way for future development.
The bridge was extensively documented in 1982 for the Library of Congress Historic American Engineering Record. The survey consists of 81 black-and-white photos and 45 data pages detailing construction and history of the bridge.
Famous quotes containing the words eagle, point and/or bridge:
“O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dower of lights and fires;
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove;
By all thy lives and deaths of love;
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large then they;
By all thy brim-fill’d Bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last Morning’s draught of liquid fire;
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seiz’d thy parting Soul, and seal’d thee his;”
—Richard Crashaw (1613?–1649)
“The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn’t ... but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O, my soul.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)