To much fanfare, the LaSalle Street Bridge opened 85 years ago, on December 20, 1928.

According to the Chicago Daily Tribune, festivities included a parade from Grant Park to the bridge, a ribbon cutting ceremony led by Mayor William Hale Thompson, and a luncheon at The LaSalle Hotel, a historic hotel at LaSalle and Madison Streets that was demolished in 1976.

LaSalle Street was an important part of the solution to Chicago’s downtown traffic problems in the early 1900s. Feasibility studies for a bridge began around 1914. In 1920, the Chicago Plan Commission began studying how to widen LaSalle Street from Washington Street to Lincoln Park. Construction of the bridge started in late 1924. (Left) LaSalle Street Bridge, photographed by Jim Phillips.

The bridge house plaque credits Donald Becker as the design engineer. Bennett, Parsons, and Frost, the consulting architecture firm for the Chicago Plan Commission, was responsible for the design of the bridge houses. Central Dredging Company built the substructure while the bridge superstructure was the responsibility of Strobel Steel Construction Company. Kelly-Atkinson Construction Company built the bridge houses.

William Hale Thompson	Edward H. Bennett	Marshall Suloway

This bridge makes quite a statement, with its sweeping pony trusses and four Beaux Arts style bridge houses. Ornamentation on these houses is second only to the houses at the DuSable Bridge. During this era of movable bridges, only two houses were functionally necessary, one for each leaf. The remaining houses are solely ornamental.

The current bridge is the second crossing at LaSalle Street. A roadway tunnel with pedestrian sidewalks opened on July 4, 1871. The tunnel provided an important escape route during the Great Fire three months later. The original tunnel fell into disuse and was replaced in 1912 by a streetcar tunnel. The Milwaukee-Dearborn Subway (now the CTA Blue Line) cut through the LaSalle Street tunnel in the early 1940s. The last vestige of the tunnel crossing, the north portal, was removed in the mid 1950s.

The bridge is named in honor of Marshall Suloway, chief engineer and later commissioner of the Chicago Department of Public Works.

(Above) East elevation of LaSalle Street Bridge, adapted from a 1926 drawing provided by Chicago Department of Transportation. Other photos obtained from historicbridges.org and chicagopast.com.

 More info: Chicago Loop Bridges