The Ambassador Bridge: World Record, World Trade, and One Man's Empire

The bridge you can see from here connecting Detroit to Windsor, Ontario is the Ambassador Bridge, and when it opened in nineteen twenty-nine it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. That record lasted about two years, until the George Washington Bridge opened between New York and New Jersey in nineteen thirty-one. But the Ambassador Bridge has held a different kind of record for much longer: it carries more trade than any other border crossing in North America.

Construction began in nineteen twenty-seven, with the McClintic-Marshall Company of Pittsburgh handling the steel work. The bridge spans one thousand eight hundred fifty feet at its central suspended section, more than a third of a mile of open steel above the Detroit River. The roadway rises as high as one hundred fifty-two feet above the water, tall enough to let large freighters pass beneath. The total structure runs seven thousand five hundred feet. When the bridge was ready for operation on November fifteenth, nineteen twenty-nine, the opening had been preceded just weeks earlier by the beginning of the stock market crash. The Great Depression had begun; the world's longest suspension bridge opened into it.

For most of its existence the bridge was privately owned, which made it unusual among major international border crossings. The man who came to control it was Matty Moroun, a Detroit trucking mogul who purchased a majority stake in the bridge in nineteen seventy-nine and held it until his death in twenty twenty. Moroun's ownership was a decades-long saga of political battles, maintenance disputes, and legal fights with the governments of both the United States and Canada over competition from a planned new crossing, the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which is now under construction a short distance downstream.

Today the Ambassador Bridge handles more than twenty-five percent of all merchandise trade between the United States and Canada by value, billions of dollars of auto parts, manufactured goods, and agricultural products crossing daily. It is, in commercial terms, the most important bridge in North America.