Skydance Pedestrian Bridge, Steel footbridge in downtown Oklahoma City, United States.
Skydance Pedestrian Bridge is a steel footbridge in Oklahoma City formed by two tapering white lattice arms that rise in a tall V, one longer than the other, above a lower horizontal truss. Its 380-foot deck, 20 feet wide, crosses Interstate 40 at a height of 192 feet and links the two parts of Scissortail Park.
The bridge grew out of the 2002 Crosstown realignment, which required a pedestrian crossing over Interstate 40. A 2008 design competition was won by the concept of Hans and Torrey Butzer, inspired by the scissor-tailed flycatcher. Construction ran from August 2011 to April 2012, and the bridge opened on April 23, 2012. In 2019 the worn wood deck was replaced with composite fiberglass.
The bridge's shape comes from the mating dance of the scissor-tailed flycatcher, Oklahoma's state bird. Architects Hans and Torrey Butzer based the two tapering white lattice arms on the bird's open tail, so the crossing doubles as a sculpture of a local symbol.
The deck is a composite fiberglass surface installed between summer 2019 and summer 2020, replacing the original wood. It is 20 feet wide and 380 feet long, so walkers and cyclists share a single corridor. The crossing is exposed to the sky, with no shelter along its length.
The bridge's 192-foot steel arms were meant to carry large cables from the bird sculpture down to the base, but the cables were cut from the design to reduce costs after the estimate rose from $5.2 million to $12.8 million. The city's budget was $6.8 million.
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