Photograph courtesy of Missouri History Museum, Swekosky-Notre Dame College Collection, St. Louis, SNDC 2-08-0019.
The warmest thing in this picture is electricity surging through power lines. Note that the welcome sign’s wired directly into them; those bulbs exude a twinkly light, but it’s easy to imagine them electrocuting some clueless so-and-so. Otherwise, it looks so cold, surely if you stuck an unmittened hand out the window, it would get flash-frozen like a batch of Birds Eye peas. That deep cold was due, partly, to coal: Until it was banned here in 1940, cheap, soft, smoky Illinois coal burned in factory furnaces and fireplaces and left a gritty black cloud hanging over the city all year—its shade nearly exterminated the plants and trees in the Botanical Garden. By comparison, the fumes curling out of the tailpipe of this truck, as it rolled off the frozen one-lane car deck of the Municipal Free Bridge, were pretty benign. And the bridge itself was downright beneficent. In this photo, it hasn’t been open a year, though it took the city six years and $6 million to build it (the city kept running out of money). Because the Terminal Railroad Association owned both the Eads and Merchants bridges, and both charged tolls, the city decided to break the monopoly with what became known, affectionately, as the Free Bridge. In the 1940s (when it was renamed for Gen. Douglas MacArthur) and ’50s, it was part of U.S. Route 66; it was how you got to St. Louis, if you arrived by crossing water. Ask people about the MacArthur now, and they’ll usually say, “You mean the McKinley?” Drive down Chouteau Avenue, near the Eat-Rite, and you can still see the entry ramp to the crumbling car deck, closed in 1981. The MacArthur Bridge is now owned by the Terminal Railroad Association, which uses the rail tracks to transport miles of sand-colored tanks on flatbeds, tank cars plastered with hazmat placards, and big, open rail carriages—loaded with Illinois coal.
