It’s a bridge unabridged. A span gone to plan. A tentacular spectacular.
It’s the Q, now with an A.
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Last Saturday, construction work on the Q Bridge, formally the Pearl Harbor Memorial Bridge, was pronounced complete with both ceremonious fanfare and easygoing allowance. Having walked up the Hamilton Street offramp, members of the general public were given permission to inspect the bridge’s final four lanes at leisure, car traffic whizzing along the other four in both directions of I-95. Kids were given chalk, mostly choosing to enshrine their own names, at least until the next rain.
There seemed to be a bit more work to do. The gray road surface was scored in fine rows like denim, awaiting smoothed pavement and painted lines. But the bridge’s distinctive straight metal cables and the elliptic concrete columns anchoring them—meant in part to evoke sails and masts, honoring the ships lost during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor nearly 74 years ago—were gleaming, helped by the gilded commemorative engravings, newly unveiled, on some of the columns.
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Highways aren’t made for walking, and that goes double for highway bridges. Saturday offered a unique opportunity to admire the edifice’s features at zero miles per hour. Once all lanes are officially open to vehicles, the view for the drivers of the estimated 140,000 cars and trucks that traverse the bridge daily will be much speedier and more fleeting. But with eight lanes to spread out across, not four, and less construction-zone orange to heed, they might still have the freedom to direct some glances sideways and do a little admiring of their own.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. To see the above photos uncropped and uncompressed, check out the email version of today’s edition. And if you like what you see, sign up to read Daily Nutmeg that way all the time, for free.
