Stewart Street Concrete Arch Bridge

Stewart Street Concrete Arch Bridge. Always known as the Stewart Street Bridge, the seven span reinforced concrete steel arch bridge carried Stewart Street over the Great Miami River for most of the twentieth century. Built using the Melan System, an invention patented in 1893 that used steel arches encased in concrete, the bridge survived the devastating flood of 1913 and inspired other Ohio communities to replace bridges lost in the flood with concrete bridges. Like the Washington Street Bridge and the Monument Avenue Bridge that stood upstream from 1906 to 2006, and 1908 to 2008, respectively, the Concrete-Steel Engineering Company of New York designed the bridge. In 1912, Daytonians E.M Gephart and Robert E. Kline built the bridge. In 1994, the Ohio Department of Transportation and The Ohio Historic Preservation Office determined that the bridge was historically significant and eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places.