History
Congress first proposed a bridge at the site of the current structure on May 24, 1886. The resolution required that the United States Department of War study the feasibility of a bridge at the site, and a 24 ft wide design was proposed later that year. The following year, the War Department suggested a "Lincoln-Grant Memorial Bridge". Congress again passed a resolution requesting another design, and in late 1887 the department proposed a "General Ulysses S. Grant Memorial Bridge". The new bridge would be a suspension bridge 105 feet (32 m) high, with 98 feet (30 m) of clearance below it. Designs for the bridge at this time included from a bare steel truss bridge, a low masonry arch bridge, and a Romanesque Revival structure with two massive central towers, two barbicans on each end, and excessively ornamentation. A survey of the bedrock in the Potomac River was undertaken in 1898,which led Congress to fund a design competition in 1899. Four designs for "colossal" bridges with massive triumphal arches over the center were submitted.
Although Congress chose a design by William H. Burr (assisted by Edward Casey, a designer of the Taft Bridge), no action was taken to construct the bridge. In 1901 a private group composed of nationally-known bridge designers proposed that the bridge extend New York Avenue NW (which then ended at 23rd Street NW) over the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery, but once more Congress did not act.
Read more about this topic: Arlington Memorial Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of mankind interests us only as it exhibits a steady gain of truth and right, in the incessant conflict which it records between the material and the moral nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more”
—John Adams (1735–1826)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)