09/17/2026
For 76 years Charleston crossed the Cooper River on two ten-foot lanes. Today it crosses on eight lanes of twelve.
The John P. Grace Memorial Bridge opened to traffic in 1929, built by a private company and celebrated over three days, August 8 to 10. The Historic American Engineering Record measured the structure at 14,313.58 feet. Its roadway was twenty feet from curb to curb - two lanes, ten feet each. The cantilever over the Cooper River shipping channel spanned 1,050 feet and carried the deck 150 feet above high water. A second cantilever over Town Creek spanned 640 feet. Construction cost $5.75 million. Drivers paid fifty cents per vehicle each way, plus fifteen cents for every additional passenger. Waddell and Hardesty of New York engineered it. For a Ford Model A, ten feet was room enough. Nothing in the design anticipated what would be driving over it eighty years later.
On February 24, 1946, the freighter Nicaragua Victory broke loose during a storm and struck the bridge. A 240-foot section dropped into the water. Five members of the Lawson family - Elmer, Evelyn, Rose, Robert and Diane - went down with their car. Repairs ran about $300,000, and a temporary Bailey span carried traffic until the permanent work was finished on June 7, 1946. South Carolina had bought the bridge from Charleston County in 1945 for $4.15 million, and the tolls came off later in 1946. The crossing kept the name drivers gave it anyway: the white knuckle express.
Traffic outgrew it steadily. HAER recorded an average of 11,614 vehicles a day in 1958, rising to about 14,189 in summer. The Silas N. Pearman Bridge opened alongside in 1966 with three twelve-foot lanes, and by 1989 the two bridges together were carrying more than 65,000 vehicles a day. By then the Grace was being managed downward rather than upward. In 1979 the state barred vehicles over eight tons, and the limit was later cut to five. Trucks used the Pearman instead. Engineers had called the Grace functionally obsolete by the early 1980s, and its 150-foot clearance was becoming a constraint on the port as ships grew.
The Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge opened on July 16, 2005. Both old bridges closed the same day. The new crossing carries eight lanes, each twelve feet wide, on a cable-stayed main span of 1,546 feet, with 186 feet of clearance over the channel and a twelve-foot walking and cycling path along the south edge called Wonders' Way. It cost roughly $700 million. Engineers sized it for 100,000 vehicles a day, a figure they expected to reach around 2030. It carried about 75,500 a day in 2006, roughly 97,900 in 2019, and about 94,400 in 2022. Twenty feet of roadway became ninety-six in a single step.
The old bridges did not simply vanish. Demolition began after the 2005 closure and finished in 2007, and more than 240,000 tons of the concrete and steel were barged offshore and sunk at twelve artificial reef sites between Edisto and McClellanville, including the Charleston 60' Reef, Capers Reef and Kiawah Reef. The South Carolina Department of Natural Resources manages them. So parts of the Grace are still out there, on the bottom, working as fish habitat. If you drove the Grace before 2005, what do you remember about those ten-foot lanes - and does anyone know which reef site took the cantilever steel?
