Poll: Name New Bridge After Dred & Harriet Scott, Stan Musial or…?
In May 2010 I did a poll about naming the new Mississippi River Bridge and the results were interesting (see Readers say new bridge should be named for Dred & Harriet Scott). In that poll I didn’t include Stan Musial in the list of possible answers, of the 33 “other” answers submitted by readers only one was for Musial. Two were for Albert Pujols…
Yesterday St. Louis said goodbye to Stan Musial.Even though his last game playing for the Cardinals was nearly 50 years ago, he stayed in St. Louis. I fully expect most readers to vote for naming the bridge after Stan Musial, given how recently he passed away.
But do we need to step back and look at the bigger picture? What name will be lasting for generations so that in 50 years the name isn’t changed to honor someone at that time? Or do we sell the naming rights like with do with facilities to help offset the cost of maintenance? The poll is in the right sidebar.
— Steve Patterson
Great post, Steve. Provides needed perspective. Stan Musial is certainly worthy of having the bridge named after him (and I have signed the petition, too!), but we are also all caught up in the moment of his death. The “Dred and Harriet Scott” bridge is appealing on a whole other level.
Good question.
On second thought, this is an appropriate place to memorialize the Scotts – literally a bridge between what used to be the slave and free states.
I thought about that, too. But, it also draws an interesting parallel as to one of the many reason why Musial is a good choice. He supported integration in pro baseball from Day One, years before the Cardinals front office would make that move. He’d go out of his way to make black baseball players feel welcome and didn’t stand for teammates’ behavior that reflected otherwise.
Very good question. While Dred Scott was important to history, I’m not sure I would want a bridge named after him or the court decision. Musial is a good candidate for a bridge naming but the decision should be put off for at least 6 months for perspective. As for naming the bridge after the worker who died building it: any people died building the Golden Gate Bridge, Hoover Dam or the Empire State Building and they thankfully aren’t named otherwise.
The names have to resonate with the public as well or they will just be referred to another way as the Bernard F. Dickmann Bridge (or Poplar Street Bridge).
Dread Scott, Cahokia Mounds, or Miles Davis Bridge (my fav) all sound great. But _anything_ is better than Ronald Reagan 🙂
While any death is a loss to those who loved or respected an individual,
cemeteries are the best place to memorialize the dead. After an unfortunate, knee-jerk naming, while I was serving on Denver’s Park Board, we adopted a policy that no naming or renaming could happen until a person had been dead for seven years. Time provides the perspective needed to appropriately designate one of the limited pieces of public infrastructure, more or less in perpetuity. Personally, I don’t have strong feelings, one way or the other, on either Mr. Musial or this bridge, just give it a name that has context – highway signs that say PSB mean absolutely nothing to non-residents!
I’m not crazy about this idea. In some ways, I think naming the bridge after Musial is a short sell on his significance. It’s not captured in a bridge naming, and, for the thousands crossing the bridge not knowing the Musial story, they wouldn’t appreciate the man for his true greatness. There’s a Walt Whitman bridge in Philly. I wonder how many people crossing that bridge know anything about Walt Whitman?
josephine baker or pierre laclade
I like geographic names. The North City Bridge. The North St. Louis Bridge. The I-70 Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge?
I’ve always liked the symmetry of naming the new bridge the Sacagawea Bridge. We already have the Lewis Bridge and the Clark Bridge.
I like the Brooklyn Bridge idea too, Brooklyn Street to Brooklyn, IL.
Anything except the Jerry Costello – William “Lacy” Clay Bridge.
Just as I call the Bernard F. Dickmann Bridge the “Poplar Bridge,” whatever this bridge is named I will refer to it as the “Brooklyn Bridge.” That being said my vote’s for Mullanphy Bridge for former Mayor Bryan Mullanphy! Known for his charity more than his mayority, his Immigrant House is located near the Missouri base of the bridge.