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Lafayette Bridge

Saint Paul, Italy

Lafayette Bridge

The Lafayette Bridge is a bridge carrying U.S. Route 52 across the Mississippi River in downtown Saint Paul, Minnesota. At this point, US 52 is on the Lafayette Freeway. The bridge spans across railroad yards north of the Mississippi, the river itself, and industrial areas south of the Mississippi.

The Lafayette Bridge is one of the longest Mississippi River bridges in the Twin Cities. An earlier bridge on Lafayette Street, built in 1905 by C.A.P. Turner, was removed to make room for the Lafayette Bridge. The 1905 bridge spanned the Soo Line Railroad tracks, not the river itself. This was an experimental bridge of Turner's design, being a flat slab resting on mushroom-capped columns for support. A replacement Lafayette Bridge was constructed during the 1960s and opened to traffic in 1968. In the aftermath of the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi bridge in Minneapolis, the old Lafayette Bridge (Pre-2015) was cited as another bridge in Minnesota with insufficient redundancy—a so-called "fracture critical" structure which could collapse with the failure of just a single support element. The old Lafayette bridge underwent in-depth annual bridge inspections using special procedures for...

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