The Merchant of Venice

More recently, an unusual event has been the arrival of the two falcons.

For some years now, the same two falcons have come each March during the breeding season and built a sparse nest under the bridge, inside the steel beams, high above the Mississippi River. Tom Fields, who oversees the bridge for the city of Venice, Ill., says some of the men in the maintenance crew carry crowbars while working on the bridge, because the falcons are known to attack, swooping down, screeching loudly, talons brandished, feathers flapping. But the falcons are still welcome. "We prefer to have them, despite all that, because they kill the pigeons," he says. Ever since the falcons started coming a few years ago, he says, "the pigeons are all gone."

Neither the bridge's past nor the falcons under its deck are on the minds of commuters on this warm August afternoon. To most, it is simply worth paying the 50-cent toll for cars (up to $1.50 for trucks) on this old bridge rather than go to either of the two free bridges — the Poplar Street and the Martin Luther King — and get bogged in traffic jams. And the cars pull up at a fairly steady stream from Illinois Route 3 to one of the four tollgates at the east entrance to the bridge in Venice, their drivers tossing two quarters into the basket as they roll through, never really stopping. Most are regular McKinley commuters and have the ritual down: Hold quarters in hand, reduce speed, pick the gate to approach, roll down window, make the basket, hit the gas.

A short distance past the tollbooths and up the bridge incline, the terrain changes dramatically, getting rougher and bumpier, and, instinctively, the drivers slow down. Where the road curves, heading straight west over the waters of the Mississippi and toward the first of three gigantic steel trusses, there is another choice to make: inside or outside. The left lane is the safer option, newly refurbished and a relatively smooth ride, taking you right inside the trusses. The right lane is for those with adventurous leanings, a noisy, scary, rumbling ride on the pavement that runs outside the hulking truss structure, but one that provides a scenic view of the Missouri shoreline, the muddy water, the tethered casino and the occasional barge. In both lanes, once past the trusses, the road gets really bad, all broken and bumpy with no visible lanes, forcing drivers to slow down to 10 or 15 mph or risk an axle, until the bridge reaches Broadway in St. Louis, a block from the entrance ramps to Interstate 70 and in eyeshot of downtown.

Fields has the unenviable task of holding the bridge up, both structurally and financially. For 23 years he has managed the bridge, which now faces a serious crisis. The short-term crisis is that the city of St. Louis last month demanded the payment of about $800,000 in delinquent property taxes dating back to 1994 — a demand that included St. Louis' threat to sell the Missouri half of the bridge to the highest bidder.

No one took the threat very seriously, but it worked anyway: After a meeting between St. Louis and Venice officials, Venice handed over a check for $57,951 to St. Louis, buying itself 90 days to come up with a financial plan.

The longer-term crisis is that the bridge will shut down in the next two to five years if no major rehab is done. And that prospect is front-and-center these days in the mind of Venice Mayor Tyrone Echols. In talking about the bridge, Echols alternately refers to it both as an asset and an albatross.

Either way, the reality is, the bridge needs a lot of help — fast.

"We have a situation where the bridge is trying to fall apart on its own," says Fields, leaning over the guardrail and scanning the sides. It's worth keeping and, with a proper rehab, could provide service for another 30 years, he says. "It's a plain and common structure and strong as an ox. It's an old dowager of a bridge," he says. After a pause, he adds, "It's still a nice bridge."

The metal-and-concrete camelback bridge designed by Ralph Modjeski has the truss superstructure atop four limestone piers that reach down to bedrock. A fairly standard design at the time, the bridge was built at a cost of about $4 million by the Illinois Terminal Railroad to carry freight cars and "interurban electric trains" right into downtown St. Louis. At the time of the bridge's opening, the city of Venice and the surrounding communities were booming with trade and industry — plate-glass companies, steel mills, meatpacking plants, lead works, railyards. The opening of the direct "McKinley lines" into St. Louis was greeted with much pomp. About 100,000 people attended the bridge's opening ceremonies on a cold November day. "There were many bonfires along the shore on either side of the river as the air was raw and cold," according to one newspaper account.

On the locomotives that trundled on the lines, the boxcars were loaded with cargo and the train cars carried the rich and the rest in style: "formal wicker seats and leather slipcovers, mahogany woodwork, even a brass, urn-shaped spittoon at the far end of the aisle," according to another published report.

Named after William Brown McKinley, the railroad magnate and head of Illinois Terminal (and not after the assassinated president), the bridge only carried trains on the two lines that ran inside the truss. In the 1930s, as the nation began its swift drive toward becoming an automobile-based society, the two outside lanes were added to accommodate cars and trucks.

And then the city of Venice made a fateful decision. In 1958, when railroad traffic had begun to diminish and the highways picked up the slack, Illinois Terminal wanted to sell the bridge and the city bought it, expecting that the toll income would prove profitable. The city used two bond series — $11.9 million and $11 million — to finance the purchase. The first series was paid off in 1988, but the city defaulted last fall on the second series and — after refinancing the debt at a higher interest rate for another 10 years — still owes $4.2 million of the original amount.

For the last 40 years, the toll bridge has been managed by what amounts to an independent city agency, with no funds flowing from the bridge into city coffers or vice versa. In short, the toll revenues ($2.2 million last year) go toward maintenance, repair and paying the 20-person bridge crew of tolltakers and repairmen, with not enough money to pay taxes and retire bonds. Contrary to 1958 expectations, the city makes no profit.

And now the delinquent-tax crisis, not to mention the prospect of the bridge's being sold at auction, has prompted a bi-state task force of transportation, political and business leaders to resolve the money and structural problems. At the task force's first meeting last week, no one proposed shutting down McKinley as an option. It was explicitly stated several times that the metropolitan area cannot afford to lose the McKinley Bridge, even though — at 13,000 vehicle crossings a day — it is the least traveled of the three automobile bridges connecting the Metro East to downtown St. Louis.

The most obvious solution is for one or both states to pay off the taxes and the remaining debt, take ownership of the bridge, repair it and operate it as a free bridge like all the rest.

But Mayor Echols, a diminutive and spry 62-year-old who has held his post for 20 years, isn't about to simply hand over ownership of the bridge. "This is a poor little black town, and the bridge is the only asset it has," says Echols. "I'm not going to be the mayor that gives the bridge away."

And so the mayor tries to link the fates of the 90-year-old bridge and the 200-year-old river town. The bridge crisis has garnered the attention of the region because the bridge is recognized by civic and business leaders as an essential part of the region's infrastructure and valuable to the area's economy. And it is generally agreed that the bridge needs — and must be provided — a multimillion-dollar shot in the arm.

No such consensus exists regarding the fate of the city of Venice.

And Echols cannot morph the political and business leaders' concern about the bridge into a concern about the city and its residents. Echols — who freely acknowledges that if the current decline in tax revenue continues, it may force the city to disincorporate in a few years — is hoping that the bridge may provide some hope for the city.

The way Echols sees it, if the civic and business leaders' solution is to pay off the debts, fix the bridge and take ownership away from Venice, there ought to be something in it for the city.