I3c Worth

A project is well under way for building a great new marble bridge across the Potomac at Washington. The plans are made, the project has been authorized by Congress. It remains for Congress to appropriate the $15,000,000 necessary for its construction.

The proposed bridge would cross the Potomac from the west end of the Mall near the Lincoln Memorial, via Columbia Island, to Arlington. Several kinds of sentimental attachments are in the project. It would reunite the North and South. It would connect the Lincoln Monument with the home of General Robert E; Lee on the Virginia shore. It would furnish a direct route from the Capitol to the National Cemetery at Arlington. It would extend the city's Mall across the Potomac to the grave of Major Pierre Charles L'Enfant, the Frenchman who designed the Capital city.

The project is not new; Andrew jackson, Daniel Webster,* President McKinley favored it. And whoever is President in 1929 of 1930 may have the Opportunity of seeing it opened.

The bridge, a concrete structure completely covered with white marble, is to be more than a mile in length. At its entrance, Columbia Island, and at the Arlington shore are to be great plazas. At each end will be two monuments, each 40 feet high. On Columbia Island will be two columns, each 166 feet high, one representing the South, the other the North, on each a statue of Victory. Eagles will decorate the piers. Forty statues will rise along the balustrade at the bridge head. All this is to be secured at a cost of about 13 cents apiece to each inhabitant of the United States.

* Said Webster on July 4, 1851: "Before us is the broad and beautiful river, separating two of the original Thirteen States, which a late President, a man of determined purpose and inflexible will but patriotic heart, desired to span with arches of ever-enduring granite, symbolical of the firmly established union of the North and the South. That President was General Jackson."