Billy Connolly's Route 66_ The Big Yin on the Ultimate American Road Trip - Billy Connolly [43]
Straddling the border between Illinois and Missouri, the Chain of Rocks Bridge follows a line of large rocks, which at one time could be seen stretching across the Mississippi like a giant’s stepping stones. But the rocks created rapids, making that particular stretch of the Mississippi extremely dangerous to navigate, so in the 1960s a low-water dam was built across the river to raise the water level. Now you can see all the rocks only during extreme low-water conditions. On the day I visited the river was very high, so we couldn’t see any of them – not that it detracted from the fabulous bridge.
Standing in front of the bridge, you can see why it has become an icon of Route 66. It has eleven truss sections that look like they’re made out of giant Meccano pieces, and it bends by twenty-four degrees about halfway across the river. The construction company had purchased land on each side of the river, but the parcels were not directly opposite each other. Initially they planned to build the whole bridge on a diagonal, but the US Army Corps of Engineers objected to that plan on safety grounds. So they built the first section, which crosses the major navigation channel, straight across the river from the Illinois shore. Then the remaining part was built at an angle to meet up with the Missouri shore.
Now decommissioned and out of use for motor vehicles, the Chain of Rocks Bridge takes only bicycles and pedestrians these days, but we had secured special permission to drive my trike across it. Built in 1929 as a toll bridge, at first it wasn’t very successful, mainly because it didn’t connect easily to downtown St Louis. Soon after opening the bridge, the company that built and operated it went bankrupt, so it was handed over to Madison, Illinois, the city at its eastern end. In 1936 it was included in Route 66, and traffic numbers soared. By the time it was closed in 1970, the city had made seven million dollars profit from it. Not bad, eh?
For years a wee mystery surrounded the bridge. Every year a huge bouquet of flowers would appear on it. Nobody knew what these signified until 1959, when someone noticed an envelope attached to the flowers. Inside, they found a tragic wee note dedicated to Todd Costin, who had worked on the bridge and had fallen off in 1929, just before it was completed. Engineers had predicted that there would be ten fatalities during construction, but only Todd was killed. He was dragged to the bottom of the Mississippi by the weight of his tools.
In the mid-1970s Madison City wanted to demolish the bridge, but a recession put paid to that when the market price for scrap iron collapsed. At the time, the cost of demolishing the bridge would have been several million dollars more than its scrap value. So the bridge was left to rust, largely forgotten until a local bicycle group rediscovered and renovated it to create what might well be the longest pedestrian and bicycle bridge in the world.
The bridge is still in a pretty rusty state, but I like it. It has a rural, funky, southern feel to it. And it was lovely rumping along it on my bike, with the metal rattling and the noise of the engine echoing all around me. At the far end of the bridge, I arrived in Missoura. Did you notice how I went all local there? We know it as Missouri, but all the locals say Missoura. And it’s St Lewis, not St Louie – you have to pronounce it that way if you don’t want them thinking you’re a square.
From the bridge, I had a good run of a few miles down the road with a helicopter following me, which is always a gas. I feel like such a star whenever I do that, like Ray Liotta in Goodfellas. I was scared to look around for the helicopter, so I just leaned back on my trike and posed. I was being moody and bikey and overtaken by trucks, and it was a jolly day – the kind of day when I feel like I’m being successful at what I do. Usually I don’t actually know what I’m doing. It’s the