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Montopolis Bridge
The Montopolis Bridge is a historic Parker through truss bridge in Austin, Texas. It is located in the Montopolis neighborhood where a bicycle and pedestrian walkway crosses the Colorado River in southeastern Travis County. The bridge consists of five 200-foot Parker through truss spans and four 52-foot steel I-beam approach spans resting on reinforced concrete abutments. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places on October 10, 1996.[2] The Montopolis Bridge sits at the best crossing of the Colorado River in the area with the historic crossing of the El Camino Real de los Tejas National Historic Trail just to the east.[3] HistoryOn June 15, 1935, the city of Austin suffered a devastating flood along the Colorado River. The original Montopolis bridge, built by Travis County in the late 1880s, was one of five bridges washed away by the flood. The Texas Highway Department designed the current bridge and requested federal emergency relief funds from the Bureau of Public Roads to rebuild it.[4] Work on the bridge began on February 15, 1937. The bridge was completed on February 11, 1938, by Vincennes Steel Corporation under contract to the Highway Department at a cost of nearly $232,000 (equivalent to $5,020,000 in 2023).[5] The Montopolis Bridge remained in use until 2018 and, as one of the principal routes to the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport from Downtown Austin, was fairly busy. The southbound frontage of U.S. 183, Airport Boulevard and East 7th Street all merge at the north side of the bridge. In 2006, 29,200 vehicles crossed on average each day. The bridge was decommissioned for vehicular traffic on October 8, 2018,[6] and was subsequently converted to a bicycle and pedestrian bridge as part of the Bergstrom Expressway Project.[7]
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