Bridges of Cincinnati

Tuesday 10 January
My day started with Knitting ministry - just five of us today - but we had a nice catch up after the holidays. I hadn’t seen Charma for several months - she is our baby hat knitter extraordinaire - they go to the local maternity unit - she brought in 40 today! I got back home for 11.30, and then we drove downtown for our usual Tuesday Music Live at Lunch at Christ Church Cathedral - a piano recital today. Afterwards, the weather was dry and partly sunny, so we went for a walk across the Ohio river - the boundary between Ohio and Kentucky. I decided to blip some of bridges today. The thumbnail photo is the John A. Roebling Suspension bridge. When opened on December 1, 1866, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world at 1,057 feet main span, which was later overtaken by John A. Roebling's most famous design of the 1883 Brooklyn Bridge at 1,595.5 feet. The yellow arched bridge is the Daniel Carter Beard bridge, locally referred to as the Big Mac bridge, the yellow arches being reminiscent of the Golden Arches logo of McDonalds. The bridge is a yellow twin span steel bowstring arch bridge carrying the Interstate I-471 across the Ohio River between Cincinnati and Newport, Kentucky. The blue/lilac bridge in the upper photograph is the Newport Southbank bridge, commonly referred to as the “Purple People Bridge” , since it is now a pedestrian bridge - the colour has faded over the years! The original bridge first opened on April 1, 1872, under the name Newport and Cincinnati Bridge, and was Cincinnati's first railroad bridge spanning the Ohio River. The present bridge, which was built on the original piers (which were widened during that work), opened in 1897 to streetcar, pedestrian and automobile traffic. The bridge was closed to automobile traffic in October 2001 after years of neglect and deterioration, and later rehabilitated and re-opened as a pedestrian only bridge in May 2003.