Crescent City Bridge

During my first cross-continent EV road trip in 2022, I took the I-10 out of Texas after visiting my third daughter and her husband. Driving through all those flat roads, past Independence Stadium in Shreveport—home of the "do-we-really-have-to-play-in-Shreveport?" consolation prize Independence Bowl—and into New Orleans. I had booked another Marriott family franchise hotel in Hammond, LA, because it was close to some some high capacity charging stations in the parking lot of a nearby Target. Watching the guessometer in my dash, I was betting I could go into New Orleans, scout some locations quickly, and then still have enough juice to get back to the hotel. Turns out, I was right, but only barely. I made it to the charging station that night around 9pm with 9 miles of range left.

But before I got to that white-knuckle, I found my spot in New Orleans. I had gotten down by the convention center and the river in plenty of time, so I found a comfortable place for a beer, relaxed, and then walked around a bit Before I had gotten to NO, I had settled on the Crescent City Bridge as my preferred subject, but not having scouted it, I wasn't sure where or what exactly I wanted to image. I'd been to New Orleans a few times before, but never for photography. Visiting for business was just not the same. And I suspect one could image New Orleans for years and feel like the surface was yet unscratched.

But this evening, I got lucky. It's a quasi-industrial area closest to where I parked, and many of the buildings and properties were inaccessible except to guests or were fenced off. After dodging a slow-moving freight-train [no gated crossing!], I found a spot underneath the bridge after slipping through a locked gate—which turned out to be unnecessary; the walkway along the water was open further down water—that presented some nice geometry of the bridge. Though there weren't any clouds in the sky, and my prospect underneath the bridge faced east, dusk eventually presented a complete Venus Belt of color.

Provenance: Phase One XT | IQ4.150 | Zeiss 80mm

Sunset glows around New Orleans' Crescent City Bridge
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Lunatis Civitatem: Crescent City Bridge

The Crescent City Connection carries the two great spans of its twin cantilevered truss bridges across the Mississippi at New Orleans — the longest twin cantilever bridges in the world, the westbound span opened in 1958 and the eastbound in 1988, both crossing the river at the bend that gave the city its oldest nickname. New Orleans is the Crescent City because of this bend: the Mississippi curves here in a crescent that determined the shape of the French Quarter, the orientation of the street grid, and the city's entire relationship to the water that made it and has threatened it since its founding in 1718. Made on the Phase One XT, the image holds the bridge's full structure above the river — the steel trusswork, the water below it, the city on both banks — at the scale that medium format permits. The Mississippi at New Orleans is not a scenic river; it is a working one, wide and brown and purposeful, and the bridges above it are working structures in the same spirit: built to last, built to carry, built without apology.