San Bern’s Fifth Street Bridge coming down

The old Fifth Street Bridge that carried Route 66 over Interstate 215 in San Bernardino, Calif., is going to be demolished soon, making way for a new Fifth Street bridge. It’s part of a long-planned I-215 widening project.

However, people will have the opportunity to take pieces of it home as a Route 66 souvenir, reports the San Bernardino County Sun.

“We’re going to chip up some pieces of the bridge, little chunks … and put them in plastic cube boxes with a label on it,” said Jane Dreher, spokeswoman for San Bernardino Associated Governments. “We’re going to have some photographs of the old bridge when it was being constructed in 1959.”

On Feb. 1, Sanbag, the county’s regional transportation agency, will host a tour of the site at 10 a.m. and pieces of the old bridge will be handed out.

The bridge was a fairly nondescript-looking structure, which fits in the time when it was built. Images of the old bridge can be seen in this pdf documents here and here.

The new bridge can be seen in artist’s rendering here. I have to say the new bridge looks marginally better.

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