"It was listed on the National Register in 1996 and renamed the Cyrus Avery Route 66 Memorial Bridge in 2004." [Facebook post]
This is before the bridge was widened in 1929.
It is an open-spandrel arch bridge.
 |
| Street View, May 2016 |
This is before the bridge was widened in 1929.
 |
| Credit: photo from Beryl Ford Collection/Tulsa Rotary Club, Tulsa City-County Library and Tulsa Historical Society via BridgeHunter |
 |
| 2014 photo by Michael Shulman via BridgeHunter |
 |
| Don Lindsley posted 11th Street Bridge, Tulsa OK |
 |
| Ghost Rails and Forgotten Highways posted The bridge that helped decide where Route 66 would run is the one stretch of Route 66 you cannot set foot on. It crosses the Arkansas River between Tulsa and West Tulsa, and the National Park Service calls it the first major multi-span concrete bridge erected in Oklahoma. Eighteen spans. About 1,470 feet long. A roadbed 34 feet wide, laid down across 1916 and 1917, when Tulsa was calling itself the Oil Capital of the World. It carried traffic for roughly 63 years. It has now been closed for 46. The plaza named after the man who fought for it sits at one end, lit and landscaped. The bridge itself is fenced. Harrington, Howard & Ash of Kansas City engineered it, and the original deck was not built for cars alone. A street railway ran down the center, with a single lane of vehicles on each side and sidewalks outside of that, moving people and supplies between downtown and the West Tulsa oil field. Cyrus Avery sat on the Tulsa County Commission from 1913 through 1916, the years the bridge went up. The U.S. Department of Agriculture placed him on the Joint Board of Interstate Highways in 1925. In 1926, when Route 66 was designated a U.S. highway, this bridge became an official part of it. The Park Service says it was a major determining factor in defining the road's path. The bridge kept changing. In 1929 the original balustrades came off and heavier concrete guardrails went on, cut with a stepped ziggurat Art Deco motif. In the early 1930s a second arch structure went up alongside the first, and the two were joined under a common deck 52 feet 8 inches wide. In 1935 the walkways were narrowed to two feet so the four feet saved could be given to the roadway. Then in 1980 a new span opened beside it, the old bridge closed to traffic, and it never reopened. It was listed on the National Register in 1996 and renamed the Cyrus Avery Route 66 Memorial Bridge in 2004. What has happened since is mostly arithmetic. In 2009 the city spent $650,000 to stabilize the deck and piers, replace missing concrete rails, add lighting and secure the approaches. An engineering study priced the real work: $6.3 million to repair the downstream structure, $10.5 million for the upstream one, $15.7 million for both. By March 2023, councilors were not looking at repair drawings at all. They were looking at four designs for a new pedestrian bridge, with $2 million needed just for the feasibility study and $30 to $50 million estimated to build it. The architect said preserving the old bridge probably was not feasible except where it stands on dry land. What would you do with it? One wrinkle in the 2023 plans: the bridge's place on the National Register makes a redesign harder, so officials argued the listing attaches to the site rather than to the structure, which would let them rebuild and still chase historic grants. Cyrus Avery, for his part, served as vice president of the U.S. 66 Highway Association in 1927, the year after the road got its number. Route 66 was designated in 1926, which makes 2026 its centennial year. The image above is an illustration, not a photograph — no federal archival photograph of this bridge exists to pull from, and I would rather draw it than pass off someone else's picture. |
At the south end of the bridge is the Route 66 Neon Sign Park.
 |
| Street View, Sep 2022 |
 |
| Scott Briggs, Sep 2022 |
 |
| 1954 Tulsa and 1956 Sand Springs Quads @ 24,000 |
 |
| route66 |
No comments:
Post a Comment