Huey P. Long Bridge

Getting a train across the Mississippi here took decades of argument and a great deal of sand. A high-level bridge was proposed as early as 1892, until a depression stopped it. A 1916 amendment gave the city sole power to build a crossing, and planners weighed a drawbridge, a tunnel and a high span; the War Department turned the drawbridge down. Bedrock lies about 1,000 feet below, so the piers rest on fine sand 160 to 170 feet under the Gulf's mean level. It opened in December 1935, and the 2006 to 2013 widening cost $1.2 billion.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 — 5.4 mi
  The Garden District's 1833 cemetery of about 1,100 family tombs, closed to visitors in 2019 and reopened on October 1, 2026 for small guided tours run by the Preservation Resource Center.
• St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 — 6.2 mi
  New Orleans' oldest surviving city of the dead, opened in 1789 after the fire of 1788 and the burial place of Homer Plessy, reachable only on a guided tour since March 2015.
• Congo Square — 6.4 mi
  The 2.35-acre corner of Louis Armstrong Park where, from 1817, New Orleans confined Sunday dancing by enslaved people to one place, and where crowds of hundreds gathered to drum, dance and trade.
• The Historic New Orleans Collection — 6.5 mi
  A French Quarter museum and research center founded in 1966, whose 2015 Purchased Lives exhibition took on New Orleans' place as the largest slave market in antebellum America.

More markers nearby

• Wedell - Williams Airport Site — 0.5 mi
• Marsalis Mansion Motel — 1.0 mi
• Camp Parapet — 1.2 mi
• Jefferson Highway — 1.7 mi