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For years, I’ve crossed the Washington Avenue Bridge daily as part of my job teaching urban studies and geography classes. The quarter-mile-long piece of infrastructure is an iconic, if unglamorous, link between the two sides of the main University of Minnesota-Twin Cities campus over the Mississippi River. Built in 1965, and a staple of media photos ever since, the bridge is showing its age. Formerly more interesting, it’s devoid of character these days, more of a blank space than anything worth savoring.
Apart from the occasional bake sale, for years one of the only things to notice on the Washington Avenue Bridge were morbid details: periodic small memorials to people who’ve died on the spot, clumps of aging flowers affixed to the base of the railing. That’s because the bridge itself has a less-publicized track record, visible only by the small signs boasting mental health hotlines and suicide prevention.
For many years, the bridge has been a site of repeated suicides.
The prevention of ideation and contagion foreclose going into more details, a lesson I learned years ago while writing about St. Paul’s Smith Avenue “high bridge.” At the time, there was a debate over re-decking that bridge, and I attended a suicide survivors group that had been pushing for higher fences. The room full of family members was deeply moving, everyone trying doggedly to piece together the complex causality of personal tragedies. At the very least, they argued, we should do what we can to use infrastructure to prevent more human loss.
That’s the situation today on the University of Minnesota campus, where survivors have put in years of effort to little avail. Despite pleas for change to the bridge, the involved parties — Hennepin County, which officially “owns” the bridge, the state of Minnesota and the university itself — haven’t solved the problem.
In November, led by incoming U President Rebecca Cunningham, the school erected bulky chain-link fences along the railings on both sides of the bridge. The crude solution to the problem, along with a very bored looking 24-hour security guard, makes it clear that now is the time to act to change the situation and stop the next tragedy. It’s incumbent on the Minnesota Legislature to fix this problem this year.
A history of neglect
The Washington Avenue Bridge is certainly showing its age these days. Originally built as part of the university’s ambitious post-war expansion across the river, it was part of a modernist fantasia, a two-level structure with a freeway on the bottom and a pedestrian-only deck on top. When it was planned, it was slated to have shops and public space on the top deck — a feature that was scrapped from the final design. The idea was to create a public space that literally transcended both nature and transportation, allowing the bridge to link the old and the new across one of the country’s magnificent riparian gorges.
Today, a light-rail train runs where the extra highway lane used to be, and the highway itself — thankfully — has been almost entirely removed. However, the pedestrian deck, once heated and pleasant, has become almost dystopian. Some windows have been replaced by clear plastic and the heating coils have been useless for years, leaking through the winter into yellowed stalactites.
Worse yet, the interior panels that were once painted to reflect the diversity of on-campus groups — a hundred or more often amusing bespoke murals painted fresh each year in a delightful ritual — have been removed and covered with drab maroon. The doors at each end have similarly vanished, likely because of COVID-era squatters, making a sometimes-vibrant place into a negative space between the river banks.
The bridge should probably be re-decked or renovated, its mid-century modernist light poles replaced with something that reflects some semblance of 21st century technology, but given its everyday importance as a transportation link, that would be very disruptive. At any rate, the last thing this bridge needed is a solid wall of morbid chain link.
The Legislature needs to act
“It just has to happen,” said state Sen. Scott Dibble, the chair of the Senate Transportation Committee, talking about the funding bill he put toward the bridge this year.
Dibble has pushed legislation to fund suicide preventaton infrastructure before, but this year he’s more insistent. The temporary fencing has been up along both sides of the Washington Avenue Bridge for over six months, casting a bleak pall over the bridge, both physically and mentally, during an already difficult time for higher education.
The move amounted to an infrastructural “call to question” — the parliamentary Robert’s Rules maneuver — whereby one member forces the rest to act in an up-or-down way. In this case, the university is pressing either the county or the state to finally foot the money for bridge fencing.
One administrator I spoke with praised Cunningham on this part, saying that she had finally made something happen around a persistent and grim problem. At the same time, because of the delicate nature of mental health crises, the situation has flown under the radar. Walking over the bridge the other day, I bumped into a faculty colleague. “What’s this fence all about? How long has it been here?” they asked me. I gulped and explained it.
Dibble’s Senate bill presents one small wrinkle. It relies on the new regional three-quarter-cent sales tax, passed in 2023, which set aside funding for “active transportation” across the region. As the bridge is pedestrian-only, at least on the top level, it’s theoretically eligible for the funding, but the allocation presents an end-around what should be a competitive bidding process. That’s not a great precedent for what ought to be a regional funding source.
According to Dibble, the sales tax is the best solution during a difficult year at the State Capitol, and using other sources would be much more difficult. A competing House proposal for bridge funding calls on Hennepin County to foot the bill, something Dibble described as a “heavy lift.” Meanwhile the state’s bi-annual bonding package, normally a good source of money for regional bridge improvements, is going to be small and precious. Dibble said there was no chance it would fund the $15 million in prevention measures.
Whichever version of the bill makes it into the final omnibus package, the state should find a way to fix the bridge this year. Walking around campus this week, I found myself dodging ubiquitous tours of prospective students. I watched as one guide, walking backwards and wearing a megaphone, described the beautiful vista in front of the art museum: the river, the bridge and the downtown skyline. She did not mention the chain-link fence, and I hope that no one asked.
The time has come to fix a persistent problem, prevent another predictable tragedy and return some normalcy to the heart of campus. Research shows that infrastructure measures like nets, in the aggregate, prevent suicides. That means that the temporary fences might have already saved lives, but the school deserves something permanent and tasteful. The idea of students experiencing another year of chain link along what should be a vibrant, beautiful public space fills me with melancholy.
For more information on mental health and suicide prevention, see the National Alliance on Mental Illness Minnesota website here. Those individuals needing immediate help can call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at 988.
