Washington, D.C. Tower Bridge envy tempted America even before London’s iconic structure finished stretching across the Thames.
An April 2016 post on Emerging Civil War, “The Bridge Between Lincoln and His Soldiers,” by the blog’s managing editor and co-founder, Christopher W. Mackowski, Ph.D., notes the curious case of the never-constructed U.S. Grant memorial bridge in Washington, D.C. Mackowski cites a Smithsonian Magazine online article, “The Monuments That Were Never Built,” of November 23, 2011, that summarized:
In 1887, just three years after a similar design by another architect was accepted for London’s Tower Bridge, the architectural firm Smithmeyer and Pelz, in collaboration with the Army Corps of Engineers, proposed a Memorial Bridge honoring Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. The bridge, connecting Washington to Arlington, Virginia, was medieval-looking, with two, tall stone towers near its center and pairs of round turrets at other points along it. Talk of actually building the bridge, though, soon fizzled out. Instead, 45 years later, a low-rise Memorial Bridge was built in approximately the same location, extending from the backside of the Lincoln Memorial to Arlington Cemetery. Towerless, it does not obstruct any views.
The proposed design reflects the Victorian era’s neo-Gothic or Gothic Revival period in art and architecture. Gothic Revivalism produced thousands of noteworthy works, mostly in the United Kingdom, including the Palace of Westminster—the home of the British Houses of Parliament—most of which was built, following a fire, during 1840–1876 (with various preexisting, centuries-old elements included). But examples exist on this side of the pond, too. One example is the Smithsonian Institution Building (“The Castle”), in Washington, D.C., completed in 1855.
You can see a larger-format computer-generated image (CGI) interpretation of the proposal at “The 4 most impressive bridges that we never built,” on the website of 911 Metallurgist https://www.911metallurgist.com/most-impressive-bridges/. From the website:
It would have been quite a sight: “[No] such elaborate and imposing structure of the bridge’s kind has ever been built or even contemplated before in the United States,” according to a Baltimore Sun article published in 1887, “and its resemblance to the causeway of a great fortress, approached by a series of fortified outworks, is kept up by the bold arches spanning the roadway and their supporting towers and turrets.”
