By Kevin Flynn
Inside-Lane.com

A lot of drivers think it’s metro Denver’s “Bridge to Nowhere” but it’s really not.

Drive along Interstate 225 by the Dayton light rail station, and just to the east you’ll see what seems to be a highway bridge that is not connected to any roadway.

An Inside Lane reader contacted me about this bridge and wondered why it didn’t have a road across it. He uses it to get to Cherry Creek State Park but said “it seems kind of silly to have such a large bridge carrying a few bikers and peds every day.”

I knew the answer because when I was at the Rocky Mountain News, I would periodically get an inquiry about this from readers.

The Colorado Department of Transportation calls it a pedestrian bridge, but when it was built in 1976, you could call it that until the cows came home and it would still be . . . a bridge to let the cows come home.

The Dayton Street overpass on I-225 was built to connect two sides of a farm property that was being bisected by the new highway. The freeway would have landlocked the fields on the south side from the farmhouse and outbuildings on the north side. Instead of acquiring the southern portion that would have been rendered useless to the farmer, CDOT – then known as the Colorado Department of Highways – built the overpass for the farm animals to get to the fields.

And, according to Stacey Stegman, CDOT’s spokeswoman, the initial plans for the area envisioned that Dayton Street would be developed and that an interchange would be built there. So instead of building a simple underpass for the animals, the state built a bridge to highway standards.

“The bridge was constructed for a future interchange and since the monies were available with the 225 project, the structure was built and dirt was placed over the concrete deck,” Stegman said, attributing the information to CDOT’s Denver regional maintenance supervisor, Roy Smith.

All of it is visible on the U.S. Department of Agriculture aerial photo from 1977, shown to the left, the year after the bridge was built. Cherry Creek High School can be seen at the bottom of the photo. A comparison with the current aerial photo as seen on Google Maps shows the growth that has taken place in the 33 years since then – including the addition of the light rail station in the I-225 median.

I-225 was built in stages southward from its big interchange with Interstate 70. Starting in the mid-1960s, when I-70 was being pushed out from Denver toward Kansas, I-225 was built from that junction and by 1966, had reached Sixth Avenue. In 1970, I-225 ended at Mississippi Avenue and, two years later, it had reached Parker Road.

The segment along the base of Cherry Creek Dam was completed to Yosemite Street – including the Dayton overpass – in 1976. One year later, the junction with Interstate 25 was opened at the old Full House interchange, which was completely rebuilt in the T-REX project that opened four years ago.

You can read more about I-225 at Matt Salek’s Highways of Colorado site.