These two concrete girder bridges carry the new US-53 expressway bypass around the small town of Gordon, Wisconsin. The bypass was opened in 1998, making it 10 years old as this was written. These are two independent bridges, so both the state of Wisconsin and NBI track them as two different bridges.

These two expressway bridges are very typical bridges from the 1990s. They are built to be low cost yet be totally functional and have a long life. At the same time, there has been zero effort put into these bridges to add any decorations, or to give the bridges any of the stature of the river that it is crossing. That sums up the entire US-53 4-lane highway project in northern Wisconsin. It was built to be inexpensive yet functional, and since it does not have the traffic to warrant spending large sums of money, the highway has to be inexpensive to maintain.

The small town of Gordon is an interesting spot given that it has 5 bridges that cross the St. Croix River in close proximity. These two US-53 bridges are on the west end of town. Moving to the east, we then see the old US-53 bridge, the old railroad bridge (now used as a regional trail), and finally the hefty Wisconsin Central railroad bridge.

Note the interesting numbers for the traffic counts above. The southbound bridge is reported as having almost 1,000 more vehicles a day cross that span. I know of no reason that the traffic numbers should not be nearly equal, so I am assuming that this is some kind of data error.

The photo above and the next three photos below show the southbound span. The final two photos below shows the northbound span.