Broadway Avenue Bridge is a girder bridge that spans the Mississippi River in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was built in 1987 and was designed by Norman C. Davis and Shawn Pierson Bruns of VanDoren-Hazard-Stallings. The bridge has a rather streamlined shape, but its piers are more ornate. The piers have two flat columns that taper together, with a base that extends out to the full width of the bridge.
This bridge is the third bridge to cross the river at this location. The first bridge was a wooden structure completed in 1857, but washed away in a flood in 1859. The second bridge was a four-span Pratt truss bridge built in 1887. It spanned the northern industrial district that was developing on both sides of the river. The 1887 bridge was very ornate, featuring finials on each top corner and a band of scrolls, crosses, and lines between them. The horizontal struts and guard railings used X-shapes as a pattern. In 1950, the bridge was raised 20 feet to allow barges and larger boats to pass underneath. The old bridge was removed in 1985, but a single span of the bridge lives on as the Merriam Street Bridge that connects Nicollet Island to the St. Anthony section of Minneapolis.
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Famous quotes containing the words broadway, avenue and/or bridge:
“We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Only in America ... do these peasants, our mothers, get their hair dyed platinum at the age of sixty, and walk up and down Collins Avenue in Florida in pedalpushers and mink stoles—and with opinions on every subject under the sun. It isn’t their fault they were given a gift like speech—look, if cows could talk, they would say things just as idiotic.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)
“Oh, who will now be able to relate how Pantagruel behaved in face of these three hundred giants! Oh my muse, my Calliope, my Thalie, inspire me now, restore my spirits, because here is the ass’s bridge of logic, here is the pitfall, here is the difficulty of being able to describe the horrible battle undertaken.”
—François Rabelais (1494–1553)