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Danziger Bridge

1988 establishments in LouisianaBridges completed in 1988Bridges in New OrleansBridges of the United States Numbered Highway SystemRoad bridges in Louisiana
U.S. Route 90Vertical lift bridges in Louisiana
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The Danziger Bridge is a vertical lift bridge that carries seven vehicular lanes of U.S. Route 90 (Chef Menteur Highway) across the Industrial Canal in New Orleans, Louisiana. Built to replace the old Danziger Bridge, a draw bridge constructed in 1931–1932, the current Danziger Bridge was constructed on the south side of the old bridge between 1983 and 1987 and officially opened in February 1988. Named after a New Orleans lawyer and businessman, it became the widest lift bridge in the world. Most marine traffic is accommodated in the down position. Attorney Alfred Danziger, a member of a prominent New Orleans Jewish family, served as personal attorney for Governor Huey Long as well as assistant attorney general in 1934 and executive counsel for Mayor Robert Maestri from 1936 to 1946. He was also a principal fundraiser for the historically black Dillard University which was founded in 1930 by merging Straight University and other African American serving institutions.In 2005, the bridge was the site of the Danziger Bridge shootings, in which two unarmed African American civilians were killed by members of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD.) Four (4) other civilians were also wounded.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Danziger Bridge (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Danziger Bridge
Chef Menteur Highway, New Orleans

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Latitude Longitude
N 30.008333333333 ° E -90.027222222222 °
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Danziger Bridge

Chef Menteur Highway
70126 New Orleans
Louisiana, United States
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Danziger Bridge shootings
Danziger Bridge shootings

On the morning of September 4, 2005, six days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, members of the New Orleans Police Department (NOPD), ostensibly responding to a call from an officer under fire, shot and killed two civilians at the Danziger Bridge: 17-year-old James Brissette and 40-year-old Ronald Madison. Four other civilians were wounded. All the victims were African-American. None were armed or had committed any crime. Madison, a mentally disabled man, was shot in the back. The shootings caused public anger and further eroded the community's trust in the NOPD and the federal response to Hurricane Katrina overall.The NOPD attempted to cover up the killings, falsely reporting that seven police officers responded to a police dispatch reporting an officer down, and that at least four suspects were firing weapons at the officers upon their arrival. Rev. Raymond Brown, the local head of the National Action Network (NAN), described the shootings as "...a racial tragedy."On August 5, 2011, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted five NOPD officers of myriad charges related to the cover-up and deprivation of civil rights. An attorney for the U.S. Justice Department described the case as "the most significant police misconduct prosecution [in the U.S.] since the Rodney King beating case". However, the convictions were vacated on September 17, 2013, by U.S. District Judge Kurt Engelhardt due to prosecutorial misconduct, and a new trial was ordered. The Justice Department appealed the decision to vacate the convictions, but a federal appeals court agreed that a new trial was warranted.On April 20, 2016, the five former officers pleaded guilty to various charges related to the shooting, and in return received reduced sentences ranging from three to twelve years in prison. Three of the officers are white and two are African-American.

Almonaster Avenue Bridge
Almonaster Avenue Bridge

The Almonaster Avenue Bridge is a bascule bridge in New Orleans, Louisiana. The bridge has two vehicular lanes of Almonaster Avenue and two railroad tracks over the Industrial Canal. The bridge is named after Almonaster Avenue on which it is built. It is one of the first four bridges built by the Port of New Orleans and was completed in 1919 in order to provide railroad access across the Inner Harbor-Navigational Canal, locally referred to as the Industrial Canal. Besides Almonaster Bridge, two of the sister bridges at St. Claude Avenue and Seabrook, remain in service today. The bridge also served to re-connect Old Gentilly Road, which had been severed by the construction of the Industrial Canal. (Almonaster Avenue did not exist at this point.) Old Gentilly Road was part of the Old Spanish Trail and provided the only vehicular route east out of New Orleans at the time. U.S. Route 90 was routed over the bridge from 1926 until 1932, when the original Danziger Bridge on the new Chef Menteur Highway was completed to the north. The bridge has a horizontal clearance of 83 feet (25 m) with unlimited vertical clearance when fully retracted. The Almonaster Bridge provides two vehicular lanes and a single railroad track crossing down the center of the span. Since Hurricane Katrina destroyed the roadways leading up to it, the bridge now normally stays in the up position, being lowered as needed for rail traffic. The Port of New Orleans, the Regional Planning Commission, and the Louisiana Department of Transportation and Development have an ongoing feasibility study underway for replacing the bridge with a modern structure.