Martin Luther King Junior Bridge

The Martin Luther King Bridge is a steel cantilever truss carrying a roadway across the Mississippi River, painted a pale tan. Over the main channel the riveted trusses rise into deep cantilever arms that peak above the river piers and taper toward a suspended center span, their web a dense lattice of built-up members. Shorter deck-truss and girder approaches on tall concrete piers carry the roadway out to the span from either bank.

The bridge opened in 1951 as the Veterans' Memorial Bridge, built by the City of East St. Louis as a toll crossing to relieve congestion on the MacArthur Bridge to the south. Its design team included the Chicago firm Hazelet & Erdal and Charles Alton Ellis, who had been the principal engineer of the Golden Gate Bridge and worked on the design until his death in 1949. The bridge once carried U.S. Routes 40 and 66 across the river. After the toll-free Poplar Street Bridge opened in 1967, traffic and toll revenue fell and the structure went into disrepair. In 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it was renamed in his honor. Missouri and Illinois took over ownership, and the states removed the toll in 1987; a roughly $24 million renovation followed, and the rebuilt bridge reopened in 1989, with decorative lighting added in 1990. In 2009 its four lanes were narrowed to three separated by a barrier after a run of head-on collisions. The bridge closed in October 2018 for a deck replacement and repainting, reopening in August 2020.