File:Blend (2493642211).jpg

The middle of the span blends cable stays with suspension cables. It still seems like too much engineering for what's really quite a simple, and narrow, crossing, although I don't know: have suspended bridges become much cheaper (relative to basic box-girders) in recent years?

The old bascule bridge was scrapped after it found no buyers. The bridge at Cortland, three blocks upriver, was even older and rehabilitated, but I gather that North "needed" an entirely new span because the old bridge formed a bottleneck: two lanes bracketed by four-lane segments. Of course, North goes back to two lanes through a one-mile stretch in Wicker Park (five blocks west of here), so I doubt that any substantial traffic flow benefits will be realized just by moving the bottleneck.