Early Omaha: Gateway to the West
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DOUGLAS STREET BRIDGE

This is the Douglas Street Bridge that used to span the Missouri River between Omaha and Council Bluffs, the first public (as opposed to railroad) bridge to do so. The 1,400-foot-long bridge was built in 1888.

The Douglas Street Bridge was a toll bridge for the first several decades of its existence. The citizens of Omaha and Council Bluffs found the paying of a toll every time they crossed the bridge to be increasingly galling as time went by, and the issue of bridge tolls became quite a "hot topic" in the area during the 1920s and 30s. In 1938, in order to rectify this situation, the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben purchased the bridge from the Omaha and Council Bluffs Street Railway Company with the intention of making it a toll-free bridge. However - as was planned at the time of the purchase - the Knights of Ak-Sar-Ben did continue to charge tolls for use of the Ak-Sar-Ben Bridge (as the bridge was now called) for several years in order to cover the costs of purchasing the bridge ($2,350,000) and to pay off an existing debt on the South Omaha Bridge (thereby allowing that bridge to become toll-free at the same time as the Ak-Sar-Ben Bridge). The Ak-Sar-Ben Bridge finally became toll-free in 1947. It was demolished twenty-one years later, in 1968.

This is another picture of the Douglas Street Bridge, this one looking west towards the Omaha waterfront from a point on the bridge itself.