Early next year, Interstate 70 motorists will begin crossing the Mississippi River on a new bridge they’re going to call something. Officials in Missouri and Illinois have not yet decided what, which means there is a year or less to avoid the fate of the span it is being built to relieve.
The meaningless Poplar Street Bridge moniker developed as much as anything from a failure to name a structure which, while under construction, became informally known as the “bridge at Poplar Street.” I doubt very many of you have ever set a tire on St. Louis’ obscure little Poplar Street, which runs almost under the namesake bridge and cannot be accessed from the deck except perhaps by a terrible accident involving gravity.
You may know that the Poplar Street Bridge does carry a name conferred by St. Louis aldermen: the Bernard F. Dickmann Bridge, for a past mayor. But since the city does not own the thing, Dickmann is no more its official name than the Adlai Stevenson II Bridge, the title it received from the East St. Louis Chamber of Commerce to honor a former Illinois governor and presidential candidate.
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The recent death of Cardinals baseball great “Stan the Man” Musial provided at least a brief resurgence in a bridge-naming debate that I helped generate here almost two years ago.
Lots of people make a good case for what I like to call “Stan the Span,” given his long run of enormous popularity as a paragon of good sportsmanship, compassion and clean living. (The Missouri Senate has given a first-round endorsement to the Musial name; it needs approval there and in the House and Illinois Legislature.)
Only five of the 10 bridges already here are named for people, and only two of those people ever lived here. That favors Stan, I think, who spent his whole career and retirement in St. Louis.
Let’s take a quick inventory, north to south.
The Clark Bridge, at Alton, was built in 1928 and replaced in 1994 with a graceful cable-stayed design being replicated in larger scale by the nameless new one. Alton’s is named for the great explorer William Clark, who remains in St. Louis, in Bellefontaine Cemetery.
The New Chain of Rocks Bridge has an uninspired name for a plain flat deck that has carried Interstate 270 since 1966.
The Chain of Rocks Bridge is a 1929 steel truss structure named for a series of rock ledges that make navigation there treacherous. It closed to motor traffic in 1970 and has been reborn for pedestrians and bicyclists.
The Merchants Bridge is another overhead steel job, opened in 1889. It has escaped most people’s notice because it carries only trains. It was named for the St. Louis Merchants Exchange, a commodities trading operation.
The McKinley Bridge, which looks a lot like the Merchants, opened in 1910, just nine years after the assassination of President William McKinley. But it was named for a different William McKinley, head of the railroad that built it. Neither McKinley lived here.
The Martin Luther King Bridge started its life in 1951 as the Veterans Memorial Bridge, but the steel truss span was renamed after the civil rights leader — again, not from here — was assassinated in 1968.
The Eads Bridge is a stone-and-steel treasure, the first to span the river at St. Louis, in 1874. It was named for its builder, James Buchanan Eads, who lived in St. Louis and is now Clark’s neighbor.
The Poplar Street Bridge, finished in 1967, has the ho-hum look of the New Chain of Rocks, to go with its ho-hum name.
The overhead steel MacArthur Bridge opened in 1917 as the St. Louis Municipal Bridge. It was commonly called “the free bridge,” although tolls would come later. It was renamed in 1942 for World War II Gen. Douglas MacArthur, not from here.
The Jefferson Barracks Bridge is really two adjacent tied-arch spans, identical but opened separately in 1983 and 1992. They replaced a narrow steel version, opened in 1941 and now long gone, named for the military installation on the western shore.
My recommendation: Let’s name the new one for Stan and consider renaming the New Chain of Rocks and Poplar Street bridges for any worthy others. If we don’t act soon — given the Poplar Street Bridge’s default naming experience — we may end up stuck with the new Mound Street Bridge. Ho-hum indeed.
