The Minnesota Department of Transportation will build a new John Ireland Boulevard Bridge over Interstate 94 in St. Paul in 2026, but it won't be your typical bridge replacement project.
The agency will take down the 56-year-old structure piece by piece, then carefully put it back together, except with a new bridge deck, repaired sidewalks, updated bike lanes and taller railings. Accessibility also will be improved, said MnDOT spokesman Ricardo Lopez.
Decorative features, including four gatehouses added around 1990, will remain. And the new bridge, "with little things to modernize it," will be rebuilt within the same footprint as the existing bridge, Lopez said.
When the $16 million overhaul is complete, the bridge, which sits in the shadow of the State Capitol and serves as the finish line for the Twin Cities Marathon, will look largely as it does now.
MnDOT can't change the look of the four-lane bridge without permission from the Capitol Area Architectural and Planning Board, which oversees design decisions near the Capitol building.
"It has to look like the other architecture in the area and complement and preserve the vision for the historic district," Lopez said.
But how the bridge functions is within MnDOT's purview.
The John Ireland Bridge is safe, Lopez said, but cracks have appeared in the superstructure, which includes the deck, girders and trusses that bear the weight of traffic. The bridge carried an average of 7,276 vehicles, 264 pedestrians and 176 bicycles a day from May 2021 to April 2022, according to MnDOT traffic data.
