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.