Built in 1902, the Jefferson Avenue Footbridge was the first bridge of its kind in Missouri, constructed by the American Bridge Company of Pennsylvania. It carries walkers over thirteen railroad tracks, connecting the Woodland Heights neighborhood, across the tracks, to the Commercial Street district. The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2003, and has been closed to the public since 2016. It remains one of the district’s best-known landmarks, the reason many visitors come to see a pedestrian bridge spanning the rail yards that built the town.
The footbridge went up in the same year as the last Sanborn survey in our archive. Sheet 31 of that 1902 survey maps the yard it crosses: two planing mills, the locomotive erecting shop, the boiler house, and the roundhouse, the works that made the crossing necessary in the first place.
From the Red, White & Bridge Bash, celebrating the footbridge’s rededication with a Route 66 centennial drone show