The Walnut Street Bridge

The Walnut Street Bridge stretches two thousand three hundred and seventy-six feet across the Tennessee River, connecting downtown Chattanooga to the North Shore neighborhood. It was built in eighteen ninety and opened in eighteen ninety-one. According to the Historic American Engineering Record, it was apparently the first non-military highway bridge ever built across the Tennessee River.

The bridge is a pin-connected Parker through truss design, with a top chord configured in five sections that puts it in the family of camelback trusses. It is the oldest surviving bridge of its type in the Southeastern United States. That alone would make it worth preserving.

But the bridge carries darker history too. In nineteen oh six, a mob used it as the site of a lynching, the event that became the basis for United States versus Shipp. For most of the twentieth century, the bridge carried traffic and eventually closed to vehicles in nineteen seventy-eight. By the early nineteen nineties, it had deteriorated enough that demolition was discussed.

Instead, Chattanooga restored it. The renovation was completed in nineteen ninety-three. Re-opened as a pedestrian and bicycle bridge, the Walnut Street Bridge became the anchor of the city's downtown revitalization, connecting two neighborhoods that had been isolated from each other, spurring development on both banks. It is one of the longest pedestrian bridges in the world. On warm evenings, it fills with people. The view of the Tennessee River and the mountains beyond it is the view that first made settlers understand why this particular bend in the river mattered.