Early Morning bike ride on the Midtown Greenway. With all this beautiful weather, I’ve been getting out on the bike a lot more. I bought a small Point & Shoot camera that I can bring with me. I took this one with it and hopefully I’ll have more for you soon. Hauling the big camera around on the bike is a lot of work and potentially damaging to it — lots of mechanical parts in there I’d hate to vibrate to death. This bridge looks great at night too!
This scene looks so quiet and empty, but that’s only an illusion and far from the truth. There were hundreds of skiers shuffling through, with a 30 second exposure, they disappear into the night. If you look closely (click to enlarge image) you will see odd ghosts of people in the middle.
Clattering and rattling over the old span, one of four freight trains in less than an hour passes over the mighty Mississippi river. This bridge also carries the Northstar commuter train into downtown Minneapolis.
A long exposure hides the cars, but reveals their movements and intents. I chose this photo out of the set because of all of the turn signals on the right.
See the blue wavy sculpture on the left? It represents the curve the Mississippi makes as it passes through Minneapolis and over the St. Anthony Falls.
See the blue LED lights? That’s why the bridge is blue. Good to know eh? I think to appreciate this bridge, you need to get down under it and look up. The view of the city from the road is so impressive that the designers lowered the railings and minimized all structures on top. Many famous bridges flaunt their structure above the deck: the Golden Gate, the Brooklyn, the Sydney Harbour etc. But the St. Anthony Falls keeps her beauty out of site, deferring your eyes to the city she supports. How Minnesotan is that?
When you stand under this bridge, bathed in the cool blue light, you notice that she makes no sound as the traffic goes overhead, that there are no cables or decorative bits, just massive solidness all around. This bridge makes one clear statement: I will never fail you; never.
There’s a freshly paved path down here, under the bridges. You can pick it up at the Stone Arch Bridge. If you go just up just upstream of the Cedar Avenue Bridge and look, you will see this view. I’m looking forward to coming down here in the winter to see what the lights do to snow.
I love all the little hip-height lights around the base of the megaliths; they really give scale to the massiveness of them.
I have a lot more confidence in the St. Anthony Falls Bridge than I in old number 9340. Look at these massive monuments to modernism! True blue in every way. It’s very peaceful under here too, there’s barely any traffic noise and the bridge doesn’t make a sound. St. Anthony proudly carries the life-blood of the city and looks good doing it.
Can you believe that it’s been a whole year already? The new St. Anthony Bridge opened Sept 18th last year. Now a magical ribbon spans the mighty Mississippi, casting it’s cool blue light in contrast to all that surrounds it.
The last of the winter blues are on the run. This spring, the renovations around Lake of the Isles are almost complete. The shoreline fences are gone, the waterplants are doing well, the paths are all in place and they are currently cleaning and regrouting the bridges. Next on the schedule is the roads. They will be repaving the parkway which is in terrible shape. The dump trucks used to landscape the lake really beat up the road, so they waited to fix the roads after they were done, so sense in damaging a new road.
