Update: I went back and looked at 11th Street in the winter of 2022.
In my continuing series of neighborhoods severely damaged but not knocked out by interstate construction, I headed to the desolate pedestrian bridge that stretches from Jackson Park to the Near North Riverfront.
I’m sure the motorists down below us were confused; there are rarely pedestrians on this bridge, because in many ways it doesn’t go anywhere.
A recounting from a resident stated that the neighborhood’s psyche was permanently damaged the huge swath of destruction; people just felt like it was time to give up, and thousands did.
Update: The pedestrian bridge was torn down in mid December 2018. Looking back at a picture of the concrete taken in 2014, it did look like it was in a state of deterioration.
I-70 destroyed St. Cashmir”s and St. Michael’s Catholic church and hundreds of homes and lives.
A new pedestrian, disability-accessible bridge has been built in 2020 to replace the one this article mentions. When I lived in the neighborhood from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s, virtually no one used the original one, and that was when there was still a fair amount of housing east of I-70. Classmates of mine who lived east of I-70 would cross the highway using the sidewalks on Madison Street and St. Louis Avenue that ran over it. Building a new one seems a TOTAL waste of money even if the old one HAD been used, since now there is virtually no remaining housing east of I-70 along that stretch of Old North St. Louis.