Cape Girardeau bridges the transportation gap

The muddy Mississippi River was for centuries a great divide breached only by boat.

But that all changed in September 1928 with the opening of the city's first Mississippi River bridge. Before, people had to cross by ferry. The nearest bridge crossings were at St. Louis to the north and Memphis to the south.

By 1925, the Cape Girardeau ferry was carrying 17,200 vehicles annually between Missouri and Illinois.

But that was before the bridge opened, which put an end to the ferry business.

Construction of the bridge, funded by community residents who bought stock in the venture, began Feb. 5, 1927. It took 20 months to build the 43,000-ton, 4,744-foot-long bridge at a cost of $1.6 million.

In August 1928, shortly before completion of the bridge, a construction worker fell off the span and drowned.

But that didn't stop the project. The new span was dedicated on Sept. 3, 1928.

Initially, it was a toll bridge and there was little traffic because the span connected to only dirt roads on the Illinois side. "If the weather was bad, you couldn't go anywhere after you got off the bridge," former mayor Howard Tooke said when interviewed by a Southeast Missourian reporter in 1993.

During World War II, guards were posted on the bridge because of concerns about sabotage.

The two-lane bridge remained a vital connection between Cape Girardeau and East Cape Girardeau, Ill., until Dec. 13 last year, when it was closed and replaced by the new $100 million, four-lane Bill Emerson Memorial Bridge.

Thousands turned out for the dedication of the new bridge in windy, subfreezing weather. Spectators walked onto the bridge, snapping photos of their friends and relatives crowded onto the city's new monument.

Cape Girardeau's new cable-stay bridge, a staggering sculpture of concrete and steel, towers over the local landscape in a way never imagined when its predecessor was erected.

As with construction of the new bridge, the demolition work on the old bridge -- which began this summer -- was a crowd pleaser.

Hundreds of people crowded the riverfront to watch crews explode the bridge section by section, beginning in August.

On Sept. 9, a demolition blast collapsed the remaining sections of the bridge, doing more damage than expected and leaving wreckage scattered across the river.

The blast dropped the 671-foot-long span nearest the Missouri shore into the river as planned. But it also set up a chain reaction that damaged the two remaining spans.

By mid-September, some steel wreckage from the one-time city landmark still remained in parts of the river.