Over the weekend I came across the new Popular Science online archives. A quick search for Louisville turned up a snippet from May 1960 about the Sherman Minton Bridge, then under construction:
This 1,600-foot steel bridge across the Ohio River from Louisville, Ky., to New Albany, Ind., is scheduled to be opened to traffic next year.
It’s a tandem, tied-arch, double-deck design that called for building techniques used before on only one other bridge – that over the Carquinez Strait in California.
Each deck will carry a 42-foot, triple-lane road with walks on both sides.
Anyone know what the reference to “walks on both sides” means? Were they emergency walks for motorists whose cars break down on the bridge or was the bridge to have a pedestrian crossing?
The bridge was completed in 1962 and named for a Senator and Supreme Court Justice from Indiana. According to Kentucky Roads, it was named the Most Beautiful Bridge in the Long Span category by the American Institute of Steel Construction in 1961. The bridge apparently destroyed 160 homes and the Church of Our Lady in Portland was worried about the impact on its parish, and, reportedly, an engineer found a hoard of ancient Roman coins while excavating on the Indiana side dating to around 300 AD and two of them are in the collection of the Falls of the Ohio museum.
