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Minneapolis reader, COPS-book lender, and all-around fine fellow MG sent me some links to good online resources for the latest on the bridge collapse; I’ve listed them below.MG himself is fine, but as of when I last heard, he was waiting on news of a friend.
I hope you’re all okay out there, and not too freaked out.
I’ve (re-)discovered a few things over the course of the recent Days Of Rage. Some of them are great!
I found it while researching a murder (…this is a sentence I have more frequent use for than most), the true story of a neighborhood legend from my childhood. I grew up in a leafy, …
As a transplanted Minnesotan in Kansas City, I heard about the bridge when I turned on the Twins game. “Wait, what? Moment of silence? What fo….Oh. OH!”
I still feel sorta sucker-punched about it. It’s one thing to see ruins and wreckage and fire happening to some city somewhere, but that’s MY CITY. MINE. I’ve driven over that bridge a thousand times if I’ve done it once. Crossing the Mississippi just at that point offers basically the finest view of Minneapolis that can be had; no matter where the sun is, whether it’s cloudy and wet or sunny or midnight, it’s a beautiful, beautiful view. Like a postcard, every time. It always made me feel perfectly happy for a few moments. It breaks my heart that that view is maybe the last thing some people saw, and maybe will never be as beautiful as it was to a lot of other people, because who will be able to drive that way again without remembering?
I know it’s silly to mourn a view, especially one that will be back once the bridge is rebuilt. But I can’t comprehend the real tragedy, that some families had loved ones drive away (maybe to the Twins game) and never drive home again. Horrible.
Well said, Mel. I drove over that bridge and admired the glorious vista of the city that it offered last Monday evening, little knowing it was the last time I’d do so (I’m moving away from the Twin Cities later this month). The bridge wil be rebuilt, of course, and life will go on, and I’m sure a decade hence commuters will be crawling through traffic jams on the new 35W bridge cursing and sweating and not at all thinking back on what happened there in 2007. But whenever I come back to visit the city and drive that way, I’m pretty sure I’ll remember, and think about how, with a very slight tweak in timeline, that could have been me, or someone I love, dying in the river under tons of concrete and steel.
I know what you mean, Mel.
I love Minneapolis/St Paul and am going through mourning myself. I am horrified that people died because of something that could have been prevented. And, unexpectedly, after the mourning of the loss of people and the shivers of ‘it could have been me or someone I love’ is the loss of familiarity of the cities I know.
Please don’t take my descriptions of a road and a highway to mean that those are the only things I focus on. My heart breaks when I hear about those who have died, are missing, or were hurt in the collapse and there is nothing I can do to help them or their loved ones. To me, part of what a highway and a road symbolize is all of the loss and confusion that my cities are experiencing right now.
I loved driving on 35W – it is just as you described it. But my favorite road is West River Parkway, which went right along the river and under 35W. That small road crushed underneath the bridge in some of the pictures? That’s it. That was the road I took to go home after work. Even Wednesday night. It is a calming drive and has great views of the river and great walk-/bike-ways for those people. Sadly that road is closed around downtown now. On Thursday I went on to 35W and it was a ghost town. Elsewhere on other highways and roads, where you wouldn’t expect it, traffic is tied up for miles. It’s foreign to me.
But then I remind myself how lucky I am to be living in a place that I love so much that I mourn the loss of a highway and to see that there are so many people who will take care of strangers and help any way they know how.
My thoughts and love are with all of those affected by the collapse of the 35W bridge, near and far.
My husband’s family is all there, and when we heard about the collapse we began making some frantic phone calls. Thankfully everyone was accounted for.
But my sister-in-law was on that bridge not two hours before with her two boys. She was a mite spooked by the whole thing.
I’m a Twin Cities resident and I can’t really believe that it’s gone and that some people are gone with it. It seems as though I’ll drive over there tomorrow and everything will be back to normal, not disrupted traffic flows for the next two years. I haven’t seen it in person yet, but I imagine it still won’t feel real even though I’m looking at it.