urbanSTL

gary kreie wrote:If they have to be off, I think the wireless technology exists to allow a pilot to turn them off when he approaches.

Or sensors that automatically turn off the lights when a large boat is X meters away?

gone corporate wrote:
Any philanthropic readers out there want to take this forward? We'd love to see the Eads Bridge lit up if at all possible, and you'd have our collective & sincere appreciation from here on out!

Natchez paid for most of the $3 million cost of lighting their Mississippi River Bridge with government economic recovery money.

http://www.recovery.gov/Transparency/Re ... ype=Grants

"This project will install aesthetic street and bridge lighting and traffic cameras on the bridge over the Mississippi River in Natchez in Adams county."

I have no idea if they exist or not, but if there is such thing as a historical engineering foundation this might be the perfect place for a nice little grant.

I also can understand how reflections on the water can make seeing clearly a problem. Think of how hard it is sometimes to see at night while driving a car in the rain because of reflections on the street. You can't see the lines in the road or people walking across the street, etc. That being said, I would think they could position the lighting and use fixtures in such a way that it wouldn't reflect too much on the water.

bonwich wrote:Bridges (especially Eads) are not lit because the St. Louis stretch of the Mississippi is one of the most dangerous for piloting, and it's going to get even worse with the new bridge. The bridges are simply in too close proximity to each other. The Eads lighting was removed because it resulted in navigational hazards. (They tried setting up a trip on the King bridge to turn off the Eads lights when boats approached, but the bridges were too close and one severe accident was actually blamed on the lights.)

It's a nice thought, but experience dictates that it won't happen.

IIRC, it had something to do with the lights reflecting off the the water, or something like that. Or I may be way off and misremembering the reason they were turned off.

Bridges are lit all over the world. Granted, St. Louis has a lot of river traffic, but I think all these organizations are worried about where the blame would fall in the extremely unlikely case that something actually happened.

A system has emerged as described in my earlier post about the Natchez Bridge that turned on lights just 6 months ago:

“When the bridge is finally finished, we will give a phone number to the tugboat captains to call if they are having a hard time seeing,” he said. “When they call the number, the lights are shut off so that they can see better.”

Problem solved.


bridge over the river - seen from the steamer natchez by Keithius, on Flickr

Is there a lighting plan for the new Mississippi bridge?

Sent from my AT&T iPhone using Tapatalk

OK, so this is appropos of nothing, but I was looking through historical images of the Eads bridge and this caught my eye:


high-res version
Source: Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Flickr


high-res version
Source: Pruitt-Igoe Myth on Flickr

^ These images are from 1874. Look at those massive statues topping the piers when the bridge first opened, plus the flag-topped structures where the approaches meet the span on both sides of the river. But by 19 years later, in 1893, modifications had already been made. Note this image:


high-res version
Source: Raimist Design

Another view:


high-res version
Source: Raimist Design

All of the statues have been removed. The flag-topped structures have been replaced on the Missouri side with a much simpler, sans-flag versions and have been removed entirely from the Illinois side.

That got me wondering. I've never noticed the statues at all on images I'd seen previously. Whose images are the statues representing? When were they removed, and why? I'd be quite curious to know. And more to the point of this thread, is there any possibility at all that these could be restored at some point in the future?

IMO those (plus the non-filled-in windows of the bridge under the flags), if a bit grandiose in nature, make a huge positive change in the look of the Eads bridge. The statues in particular remind me of a larger-scale version of other significant European bridges:

The Charles Bridge, Prague

Source: Travefy

The Sant'Angelo Bridge, Rome

Source: Wikimedia Commons

Not that the Eads bridge is ugly now by any stretch of the imagination, but one has to admit that some of the alterations made over the years were somewhat insensitive to the original look of the bridge; many were functional first with aesthetics as an afterthought. Much of the work Metro did a few years back restored some of the original look; perhaps some federal grant money or even a private fund could be found to restore even more of Charles Eads' original design?

I'd think that'd be unlikely, but how impressive would an Eads bridge restored as closely as possible to its 1874-era (minus the changes necessary for the modern street deck and the Metrolink, of course) be?

-RBB