Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge Opens in St. Louis

Opening to much fanfare this weekend, the Stan Musial Veterans Memorial Bridge is expected to attract 40,000 vehicle trips per day, siphoning traffic away from the Poplar Street Bridge and the Martin Luther King Bridge. The new cable-stayed span carries Interstate 70 across the Mississippi River between Missouri and Illinois. Both Missouri and Illinois paid for the bridge, with help from the federal government.

A report by Ken Leisner details the span’s history as well as its technical specifications. Here are some statistics that describe the size of the four-lane bridge: “the support towers still rise 400 feet from their pedestals, nearly 100 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. And the structure ranks as the nation’s third-longest cable-stayed bridge, with a main span of 1,500 feet.”

A separate report by Richard Bose in NextStl includes images from the day of the opening, and an eyewitness account of what it was like to walk across the bridge on the day of its opening.