Monday photo feature

I love our old steel bridges just downriver from downtown Memphis.  This photo was taken while paddling through the flooded bottomland on the Arkansas side a few years ago.  There are in fact three bridges at this spot: the oldest is the Frisco Bridge, built in the late nineteenth century to carry the Frisco Railroad across the Mississippi.  In 1916-17 the Harahan Bridge was built to carry more rail traffic, and it included wooden-plank automobile lanes cantilevered on each side.  Then, in the 1940s, the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge provided a more modern route for automobiles, and the Harahan Bridge has been for trains only since then.  Interstate 55 now crosses the river on the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge.

The Hernando DeSoto Bridge, visible in the background of the photo, opened in 1971.  I was born in 1967, and so until I was about four years old the only way to drive a car across the Mississippi at Memphis was on the Memphis and Arkansas Bridge.  My family took annual trips to Hardy, Arkansas, and as a very small child I thought going across the M&A Bridge alongside the Frisco and Harahan Bridges was one of the most magical parts of those trips.

An interesting project is currently in the works for the Harahan Bridge.  The old automobile lanes are no longer there, but the steel support structure remains.  Now there is a plan to build a bike-pedestrian route here.

While poking around with my Google search engine I found some interesting pages on these old bridges, here and here and here and here.  They contain some great photographs.