A Bridge Restores a Lifeline to a Battered Town

By ADAM NOSSITER
Published: May 29, 2007
New York Times

BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss., May 24 — Sometimes a bridge is more than just a bridge. The new span across the copper-colored St. Louis Bay connects today’s diminished reality to memories of a more generous past, a hopeful link to the return of better days.

The soaring bridge was dedicated last week amid jubilation in a ceremony attended by hundreds, 20 months after Hurricane Katrina blew out the old span. That tangible sign of pushing forward and of a quickening pace — commutes now are drastically shortened — has left people in this battered waterfront town of 8,000 quietly giddy about a future recently in doubt.

And it has ended the isolation, physical and mental, of a place that once considered itself a jewel of the Gulf Coast, a sun-baked collection of picturesque old frame houses that Hurricane Katrina smashed, then severed from its brethren to the east. The surge from the storm wiped out the concrete bridge carrying U.S. Highway 90 that had stood for a half-century.

And it has ended the isolation, physical and mental, of a place that once considered itself a jewel of the Gulf Coast, a sun-baked collection of picturesque old frame houses that Hurricane Katrina smashed, then severed from its brethren to the east. The surge from the storm wiped out the concrete bridge carrying U.S. Highway 90 that had stood for a half-century.

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Paul J. Richards/Agence France-Press — Getty Images.

A seven-minute dash across the bay bridge
became a 45-minute commute around it.