History
Completed in 1940, the bridge is the second to carry motor vehicle traffic between Maine and New Hampshire at Portsmouth, and replaced a river crossing dating from 1822. The bridge was the direct result of the work of the Maine-New Hampshire Interstate Bridge Authority, which had been formed in 1937. The major goal of the bridge project was to relieve congestion in downtown Portsmouth and Kittery, where US 1 crossed the river via the Memorial Bridge, which had opened in 1923.
From 1960 until 1972, the bridge, along with the US 1 Bypass north of the Portsmouth Circle, filled a gap in Interstate 95, which had been designated along both the New Hampshire Turnpike and the Maine Turnpike. Although most of the Bypass is four lanes wide, the bridge itself originally had only a three-lane roadbed, with traffic on the center lane switching direction depending on load (the bridge has since been reduced to just two lanes). This, combined with being a drawbridge, placed the bridge far below Interstate highway standards. The turnpikes, and therefore I-95 in the two states, did not directly connect until the opening of the Piscataqua River Bridge and the extensions of I-95 leading to it in the early 1970s.
On April 1, 2013, a large tanker ship clipped the bridge, causing "severe structural damage" and leading to the bridge being closed to vehicular traffic. The I-95 Piscataqua River Bridge was the only Portsmouth bridge over the Piscataqua remaining open.
Read more about this topic: Sarah Mildred Long Bridge
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of reform is always identical; it is the comparison of the idea with the fact. Our modes of living are not agreeable to our imagination. We suspect they are unworthy. We arraign our daily employments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To history therefore I must refer for answer, in which it would be an unhappy passage indeed, which should shew by what fatal indulgence of subordinate views and passions, a contest for an atom had defeated well founded prospects of giving liberty to half the globe.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)