Taft Bridge

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Four lion sculptures sit at the entrances to Taft Bridge.

Ornamental lights on the bridge

The Taft Bridge (originally the Connecticut Avenue Bridge) is a bridge in Washington, D.C., U.S.A. It carries Connecticut Avenue over Rock Creek (Potomac River) and the Rock Creek and Potomac Parkway. Its total length is 274.5 meters.

The bridge was built between 1897 and 1907 and was named after President William Howard Taft in 1931. It is an arch bridge with unreinforced concrete arches and a reinforced concrete deck. The designer was George S. Morison, and the architect was Edward Casey. It has been called an "engineering tour de force" as the largest unreinforced concrete structure in the world (at least as of 1996).

The bridge, besides being an icon of Washington, D.C., is known for its lion sculptures by Roland Hinton Perry and for its ornamental lampposts. During a rehabilitation of the bridge in the 1990s, the original lions (which, like the bridge itself, were made of concrete) were removed for restoration. They were found to be in such poor condition that restoration was not feasible, so new sculptures were created. Using the original lions to make molds, the artist Reinaldo López-Carrizo cast new concrete lions, which were installed on the bridge in 2000.