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River Street Bridge

Iowa, US

The River Street Bridge at Marble Rock, Iowa, also known as Richard W. "Dick" Weldon River Street Bridge, has the appearance of a being a filled spandrel deck arch bridge, but it is not. When it was built in 1912, concrete girders were relatively new, and this was built with straight ones in three 3

0-foot (9.1 m) sections, by the Miller-Hey Construction Company of Des Moines, in one of its first contracts. The straight girders carried the load, and it is a girder bridge. However this was given a touch of elegance by its arched spandrels, which usually appear above load-bearing arches in deck arch bridges. Thousands of small concrete deck girder bridges subsequently have been built throughout Iowa following the design standard set by the Iowa State Highway Commission (ISHC) in 1913. The River Street Bridge and only a few others preceded that standard, only a few of which remain in use, while the River Street Bridge has carried traffic with no significant change to the bridge up to the 1994 date of its National Register of Historic Places nomination. The nomination in part reads:Of these pre-ISHC bridges - and among all of Iowa's deck girders, actually - the River Street Bridge...

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