• Tweet
• Email
• Sharebar

• Tweet
• Email

I understand that staying in the little house on the bridge has it’s ups and downs.  The Robert street bridge is a landmark in these parts.  It is on the national register of historic places,  and was built in 1924-1926.  The current bridge is a replacement for the original which was built in 1885, and was not designed to handle the large volume of car and street car traffic that came a couple of decades later.

For those who don’t know what a street car was we are currently  building light rail to replace the street cars which were replaced by buses.  Except the light rail lines are replacing the street cars that were on University avenue, not the ones that were on Robert.

The original Robert street bridge was named after a Frenchman, Louis Robert (Row-bear’) who was a fur trader, an early St.Paul land owner, and a steamboat owner and pilot. Louis Robert arrived in St. Paul in the winter of 1843, walking through the snow and wilderness from Prairie du Chien, 150 miles to the south.  Maybe he was tired from the walk because the bridge was built more than 40 years after his arrival.   It is unclear why he built it but he picked a good location and the bridges have served us well for 122 years.

The bridge is historically significant as an outstanding example of an unaltered, monumental, multi-span, reinforced concrete arch bridge.  I guess every town should have one. Located at river mile 839.20, on both banks, is 1534.4 feet in length and 78.5 feet wide.