The historic Gay Street Bridge will live out its final days much as it did in its infancy — as a conveyance across the Tennessee River for people on foot or in non-motorized vehicles.

The city hopes to reopen the bridge to pedestrians and bicyclists by the end of the year.

Knoxville city government will permanently close the landmark bridge to vehicular traffic and convert the 127-year-old span for pedestrian and bicycle use only.

The solution is only a temporary measure to extend the life of the bridge for a few more years, however, until a replacement can be built.

Knoxville Mayor Indya Kincannon said at a press conference on Wednesday that the decision was based on safety concerns about the bridge’s condition and that her plan buys time to plan for a replacement.

“The beautiful bridge is an iconic part of our city,” she said at a news conference on Wednesday. “I hope that we can preserve the current Gay Street Bridge as a pedestrian/bicycle access, and then we'll consider what we might do for a replacement bridge moving forward.” 

City officials closed the Gay Street Bridge on June 25, 2024, after a state inspection uncovered damage to the steel structure. Prior to the closure, the bridge carried about 7,000 vehicles a day between downtown and the South Waterfront.

The city hired the design and engineering firm Gresham Smith Inc. to conduct a thorough inspection, which included drones that recorded images of virtually every square inch of span, and develop a plan to repair the bridge.

Jason Brady, East Tennessee regional transportation leader for Gresham Smith, said, “Our intent for doing these repairs is to allow the city time to be able to go and get funding to replace the bridge, and we're hoping that maybe that's somewhere in that five- to 10-year window.” 

Built in 1898— about the time the first automobile appeared on the city’s streets — the Gay Street Bridge is the oldest spanning the Tennessee River in Knoxville.

The 1,512-foot-long structure consists of five pin-connected steel arched trusses and two truss approach spans at either terminus. Inspections during the past year have found misaligned steel in two trusses, along with warped lacing bars, rust, corrosion and cracks in the steel. 

At the news conference, photos showed the warped steel, and Kincannon displayed corroded and broken nuts that had been removed from the structure.

“With public safety in mind, we are now aware that the bridge, unfortunately, is never going to be able to resume everyday traffic, " Kincannon said. “We were hoping we could resort back to its regular loads, and that is not possible.” 

Noting the bridge’s 127 years of wear and tear, she said, “It's really remarkable how long the bridge has lasted, frankly.”

While the city hasn’t determined an exact cause of the damage, Knoxville Deputy Engineering Director Chris Howley said similar bridges have a life expectancy of 70-80 years.

He said a complete restoration would be cost prohibitive because it would require the removal of the bridge deck, which underwent a $15.7 million overhaul from 2001-2004, and components of the steel arches would have to be replaced as well. 

“It really doesn't make financial sense to try to do a repair of that magnitude,” Howley said.

Plus, officials emphasized, a faithful restoration wouldn’t address safety concerns. The Gay Street Bridge and other truss bridges of its type have no redundancy in their structures to carry the load if one element were to fail, increasing the likelihood of a catastrophic collapse. 

Modern bridges have redundancies built into their design to minimize the risk of failure. Because the Gay Street Bridge lacks redundancies, it cannot be brought up to modern standards, according to Howley, nor can it be rebuilt using the original design.

Officials said they don’t know why state inspections didn’t identify problems sooner and declined to speculate about the risk of a bridge collapse to drivers over the recent years. 

“It's really hard to measure catastrophes that don't happen, but I am really grateful for our safety inspections,” Kincannon said. “You don’t want to be the mayor that didn't stop traffic on a bridge because it might collapse.”

On Tuesday, the Kincannon administration will ask City Council to increase Gresham Smith’s contract by $100,000 to $538,000 to provide additional monitoring services during the repair work. The city has a total of $850,000 budgeted for the design portion of the project.

The administration will go back to City Council in March seeking a budget amendment to set aside $2 million for the repair work.

Repairs could begin almost immediately, since the city already has state-approved contractors lined up to do the work. The project would involve work crews climbing up through the bridge’s superstructure from barges to remove and replace certain pieces of the span.

Kincannon said she hopes the Gay Street Bridge would open to pedestrians and bicyclists by the end of 2025 or early 2026. Planning has yet to begin on a replacement bridge.