From a certain height, the seven metro-area bridges spanning our Good River appear as stitches holding the jagged shores of Kentucky and Indiana fast. The various patchworks of land for which they serve as sutures are as different in character as each bridge is in its history and design: Shawnee’s sandy bottomland and New Albany’s gentle knobs, downtown Louisville and Jeffersonville’s asphalt grids, Prospect’s creek-fed pastures and Utica’s burgeoning logistics hubs. The bridges themselves are little rivulets criss-crossing the bigger flow that landed us all here, currents of commute and commerce that tie Kentuckiana into one big quilt of community.
But like most everything in our little bend in the river, the quality and outcomes of these vital connections are often defined by the places from which they commence. The Lewis and Clark Bridge, while not uncontroversial, is a gleaming cable-stayed design that feels like driving through giant keyholes. The reimagined Big Four Bridge has become the centerpiece of the “Nation’s Best Riverwalk,” a designation bestowed by the fine people at Gannett Newspapers and voted on by an army of our city’s finest bots. The fraternal twins of the I-65 corridor read all the wrong studies about one-way traffic and are largely being neglected in favor of the Second Street Bridge just downstream. Infamously built from the center out, the George Rogers Clark Memorial opened just in time to usher in the Great Depression and, after a coat of fresh paint, has become a yellow-brick road of sorts, leading not to Oz but to avoidance of RiverLink’s tolls and horrific customer service.
Then there are the bridges west of 9th Street: the 14th Street Bridge that carries trains over The Falls with its iconic vertical-lift trusses and the double-decker Sherman Minton which, after years of critical maintenance and erratic closures, has once again received the civil engineering stamp of approval. But the one I’m leaving out, the first of them all and the easiest to overlook, happens to be the only one I’m interested in on this crisp, early-winter day: the Kentucky and Indiana Bridge.
The Kentucky and Indiana Bridge, shortened colloquially to K&I, opened in 1886 as one of the first bridges to cross the mighty Ohio’s 981-mile run. It was designed to be multi-modal, meaning it would function as a crossing for trains, streetcars, stagecoaches, and pedestrians alike. Construction began in 1881 with private funding from the efficiently named Kentucky and Indiana Bridge Company. In a business move that would’ve made the late Steve Jobs beam with pride, the K&I Bridge Company also owned the ferry operation that would be cannibalized by the bridge’s construction and subsequent obsolescence of boat travel as a necessity for river crossings.
The bridge’s opening was met with much fanfare. The Library of Congress advertised its ribbon-cutting and engineering societies touted its cutting-edge safety innovations. Local elected leaders from both sides of the river worked to ensure that all four modes of transportation and its right of way be preserved; at the federal level the K&I was declared part of an official postal route to maintain its right of way in perpetuity.
Upon its completion, the K&I Bridge Company immediately began operating a light rail service called the Daisy Line. Much like the bridge itself, the Daisy Line is an oft-overlooked bit of Louisville history that was revolutionary in its time. Originally a steam-driven commuter train that connected New Albany’s Vincennes Street with First Street in downtown Louisville, it built an annual ridership of over 500,000 passengers in a few short years. In 1893 the service was converted from steam to electric, a technological advancement that outpaced even Chicago’s “L” trains. Its convenience and popularity single-handedly changed how the communities of New Albany, Portland, and Louisville interreacted with one another. Boasting 15-minute service times and running between 6am and midnight, the Daisy Line grew to a yearly ridership of 1,250,000 passengers on a single line at a time when the New York City Subway had barely opened.
But the K&I Bridge that we admire today is not the same one that carried those commuters at the turn of the 20th century. Indeed, our modern K&I is a second-generation bridge constructed between 1910 and 1912 to replace the first. Built just upstream from the original, K&I 2.0 is wider, heavier, and double-tracked to account for the increase in train traffic and the invention of the automobile. The updated K&I also incorporated a rotating swing-span, something of an engineering marvel that was only used four total times before being tied down permanently in the mid 20th century. The first iteration, with its gothic turrets and its gorgeous bowstring trusses, was demolished, rendered obsolete in the same way it helped phase out the local ferry 25 years earlier.
Business continued as usual, but the world began to change around the bridge. The Daisy Line was eventually discontinued in 1945 in favor of buses. The wood block roadways were replaced with the steel grid platforms that still flank each side. In a final blow, vehicular traffic was banned altogether following an incident in 1979 in which an overweight dump truck caused a small, easily fixable sag in one of those platforms, resulting in no injuries and causing no damage to the roadway’s structural integrity, but leading to permanent closure nonetheless.
If you’re like me, an armchair urbanist and something of a sap, opening this window into the past brings up little pangs of sorrow. To live in and care about US cities is to spend a lot of time looking backward: admiring what we had before a sequence of disastrous policies, catalyzed by our original-sin-bigotries and the supremacy of the automobile, led us to dismantle nearly all the features that made our built environments functional and beautiful. Our task now is to restore beauty and function with every opportunity that comes before us, and the K&I Bridge presents one such golden opportunity.
For years now, local advocacy groups have petitioned Norfolk Southern Railway, current stewards of the K&I, to re-open one or both vehicle platforms for pedestrian use. At each turn, the railway has cited liability concerns, sometimes stemming from the safety of the structure itself and sometimes regarding the hazardous contents their trains carry (which, while we’re here, raises all kinds of questions about the safety of the many residential dwellings in proximity to the tracks on either side of the bridge.) I don’t doubt that there’s some validity to both of those points, but they’re also very plainly being used as excuses.
Since we all agree that user safety is primary, we need only look to the K&I’s origins for guidance. The original bridge garnered such a high safety rating because its designers placed high visual screens between the roadways and railway to prevent driver distraction and to calm horses and livestock. Such an update for the 21st century would achieve the same goals of focus and physical separation while providing a broad canvas for public art and local history. Roadways originally built to facilitate the passage of multiple vehicles at once could easily be inspected and reinforced where necessary to accommodate recreational walkers, joggers, and cyclists. The steel platforms, which are wide and beautiful and feature bump-outs with enough space for a car to pull over or a cyclist to pause and take in the view, could be retrofitted with solid, lightweight coverings to further increase security and peace of mind. Because of the good bones mentioned above, a project like this would require only a small fraction of the total resources that the Big Four Bridge renovation demanded. I’m not an architect or designer, but I know that we live in a moment where adaptive reuse is experiencing a groundswell, and I feel sure that we would have firms lining up to put their own flourishes on a project as unique and timely as this one.
With the recent completion of the Ohio River Greenway, the incredible momentum behind Origin Park, the urban renaissance that New Albany is undergoing, and the substantive investment in our own West End waterfront, there’s no shortage of great reasons to reopen this conversation with earnestness and action in 2026. We owe at least this much to the visionaries that first brought this project to life almost 150 years ago. What would they think of the decreased functionality of their legacy, our addiction to busyness and speed, our fear of freedom and of one another? How will we explain to them that at some point last century we traded dreams of what could be for the smug certitude of what could never?
Which brings me to my final point: it seems unquestionable that our conversations around this piece of history would sound very different if the K&I Bridge started in Glenview or Mockingbird Valley. It’s a hypothetical, sure, but the fact that the bridge connects Southern Indiana to Portland, divested, downtrodden, left-behind Portland, almost certainly plays an outsized role in the neglect of this infrastructure and the dismissal of its renewal. For too long, the commonly held view has been that the people of our neighborhood did not have nice things because they didn’t deserve them, and this idea has spread in the city’s subconscious like the self-fulfilling prophesy that it is. After decades of prejudice begetting policy, the tide may finally be turning. If nothing else, the proposed K&I Bridge revival could serve as a good-faith symbol of that sea change, an emblem of belief in the worth of our place and an acknowledgment of its centrality as a historical crossroads and point of local genesis.
So much of the destruction we’ve wrought on our communities can be boiled down to a lack of affection. I can think of no better way to know or love Portland than to reconnect it with this river crossing and, by so doing, begin sewing it back into the bigger garment of destiny we all share.
