Airline Highway

Airline Highway is a divided highway in the U.S. state of Louisiana, built in the 1930s and 1940s to bypass the older Jefferson Highway. It carries U.S. Highway 61 from New Orleans northwest to Baton Rouge, and U.S. Highway 190 from Baton Rouge west over the Mississippi River on the Huey P. Long Bridge. US 190 continues west towards Opelousas on an extension built at roughly the same time.

The highway was named because it runs relatively straight on a new alignment (see airline), rather than alongside the winding Mississippi River. The name became quite fitting, as both Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport and Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airport are along the highway. Airline Highway also runs close to the site of the old Baton Rouge airfield (near the intersection of Airline and Florida Blvd., now a park and government office complex), which brings it within blocks of the similarly named Airport Ave and Airway Drive.

History

The highway dates back to the governorship of Huey Long, who promised a more direct route between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. Originally, Airline Highway was a two-lane road that ran from Prairieville to Kenner. To reach Baton Rouge, travelers had to take Jefferson Highway (LA-73), and to reach New Orleans, travelers had to take Williams Blvd. to Jefferson Highway (LA-48) to enter the city through Claiborne Avenue. In the late 1930s, the eastern end was extended to tie in with Metairie Road and later to Tulane Avenue. The western portion of the highway extended into Baton Rouge with the opening of the Old Mississippi River Bridge in 1940. Most of the highway was multilaned in the 1950s. For a short time in that decade, it was the longest toll-free four-lane highway in the nation, as the multilaned portion ran 124 miles from the Atchafalaya River to New Orleans.^[1]

The majority of the New Orleans-Baton Rouge section was built parallel to the Louisiana Railway and Navigation Company, which was itself built later than the slightly longer Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad. The former Louisiana Railway, now part of the Kansas City Southern Railway, crosses the Huey Long Bridge with the highway and splits to the northwest towards Shreveport; the extension to Opelousas parallels the New Orleans, Texas and Mexico Railway (later part of the Missouri Pacific Railroad).

A vital link in this route included a bridge over the Bonnet Carre Spillway that was built in 1935. This bridge carried four very narrow lanes of traffic (often resulting in accidents) until the mid 1970s when a second bridge was constructed.

Originally US Highways 65 and 51 were cosigned to Airline (65 the entire length, and 51 from LaPlace to New Orleans). In 1951, Louisiana truncated the route lengths, and the highway, with the exception of a portion in north Baton Rouge, is signed as US 61.

In an effort to clean up the highway's notorious history due to the seedy hotels and motels that once lined it, the portion in Jefferson Parish has been renamed Airline Drive.

Baton Rouge Bypass

The portion of the Airline Highway north and east of downtown Baton Rouge carries U.S. Highway 61 and U.S. Highway 190 around downtown, and includes several interchanges. The bypass was designated U.S. Highway 61/190 Bypass from 1957 to 1963,^[2] after which US 61 and US 190 were moved onto it, and their old routes through downtown became U.S. Highway 61/190 Business. The bypass and business routes originally intersected in a traffic circle, which was replaced in 1967 by a cloverleaf interchange.

In the original 1955 plan for urban Interstate Highways, numbered by 1959, the Baton Rouge bypass was designated Interstate 410; it would have connected to Interstate 10 on both ends (as I-10 would have used the US 190 corridor immediately west of Baton Rouge, still crossing the Atchafalaya Swamp in its present location). The route was cancelled by the end of the 1960s (and the number was later reused for another Interstate 410).

Junction List

References

1. ^ Times Picayune, August 17, 1952
2. ^ U.S. Highways: Bypass U.S. Highways