Chain of Rocks Bridge
footbridge
The Chain of Rocks Bridge spans the Mississippi River on the north edge of St. Louis, Missouri, United States. The eastern end of the bridge is on Chouteau Island (part of Madison, Illinois), while the western end is on the Missouri shoreline. Constructed in 1929, the bridge has an unusual 22-degree bend occurring at the middle of the crossing, which was found to be necessary during construction due to both the presence of a water intake and the inability of parts of the bedrock of the river to carry the weight of the bridge.
Originally a motor route, the bridge was for a time the route used by U.S. Route 66 (US 66) to cross over the Mississippi, but the bridge now carries only walking and biking trails over the river; the New Chain of Rocks Bridge carries vehicular traffic to the north.
The old route to the bridge is now called Chain of Rocks Road and ends near Roman Road. Parking is available at the start of the now-pedestrian route. The bridge was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2006.
Name
The bridge's name comes from a large shoal, or rocky rapids, called the Chain of Rocks, which made that stretch of the Mississippi extremely dangerous to navigate. Because of a low-water dam built by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1960s, little of the Chain of Rocks is visible today except during extreme low water conditions.
The public source identifies “Chain of Rocks Bridge” as footbridge. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Chain, Rocks and Bridge.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q592557. Authority coordinates are 38.761, -90.176. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1929 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Chain of Rocks Bridge” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.