London Bridge

I just remembered that when I told you all about my Jetboat tour down the Colorado River to Lake Havasu City in Arizona, I didn’t tell you about London Bridge itself.

Back in 1968, industrialist Robert McCulloch, he of McCulloch Oil and chain saw fame, bought the bridge made famous by the children’s song for a cool $2.6 million. The bridge was actually falling apart and London had put it up for sale.

“Pack it up and mail it!” he cried, slapping the cash down on the table. (Well, maybe not exactly like that, I tend to lapse into hyperbole sometimes when I get excited.)

The first truckload of parts arrived July 1968, and by the time Halloween rolled around three years later, there the bridge stood, spanning the newly created Bridgewater Channel Canal.

It’s interesting that the bridge was NOT constructed over water, but over land. The channel was dredged later, resulting in turning Pittsburgh Point into an island.

It cost an additional $7 million to complete the bridge. 

I was actually expecting to see towers on the bridge, having mistaken it for the Tower Bridge in London, which actually is the next bridge downstream on the River Thames in London. I wonder if Robert McCulloch made the same mistake.

Anyway, I wasn’t terribly impressed by the bridge, and if I’d made the four-hour roundtrip cruise for the express purpose of seeing the bridge, I would have been sorely disappointed. As it was, I was only “kind of” disappointed. The trip itself was fun.