Grand Avenue Bridge

A suspension bridge carrying Grand Avenue over the railroad yards in three hung spans, a 400-foot main span between two 150-foot side spans, on a deck 60 feet wide. Paired iron towers rose at each end of the main span, every pair tied together overhead by a girder pierced with a round-arched opening and trimmed with latticework. Stiffened eyebar chains, not wire cables, carried the deck, which held streetcar tracks down both sides. Cast-iron railings with circular scroll panels lined the sidewalks, interrupted by lamp posts topped with globe lights and by squat iron pedestals at the abutments. The approaches rested on walls of rough-faced stone.

Planning for a viaduct to carry Grand Avenue over the Mill Creek rail corridor was under way at the Board of Public Improvements by 1885. Carl Gayler designed the bridge, and the King Bridge Company of Cleveland fabricated and erected the iron superstructure, with the St. Louis Bridge and Iron Company and John Bambrick as subcontractors. The steel was prefabricated in Cleveland and shipped to St. Louis. Complaints about the pace of construction reached the newspapers in 1888, and the bridge opened on August 17, 1889, at a cost of about $400,000. It carried streetcars, wagons and pedestrians across the tracks. By the 1950s the bridge had badly deteriorated. Demolition began on February 15, 1960, and dismantling of the spans continued into June. Construction of a new viaduct was under way by November 1960. That bridge was itself replaced in the 2010s by the current one, whose design was meant to echo the original.