Builders of Windsor's Gordie Howe bridge are just metres away from scoring a key goal

The design of the Gordie Howe International Bridge is meant to evoke the bend of a hockey stick making a slap shot. But as the mammoth project nears its biggest milestone to date, a more apt comparison would be Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam – or perhaps the movie poster for E.T.

For nearly six years, the largest bridge ever built between Canada and the United States has grown in two separate parts, extending toward each other from opposite banks of the Detroit River. In recent weeks, the vast and gracile structure has come to resemble a pair of outstretched fingers that are almost but not quite touching. Visible from miles around, the scene embodies drama and demands closure.

Now, the moment of contact is close at hand.

By late May, the space separating the two halves of the 2.5-kilometre-long bridge had shrunk to a mere 11 metres. Project managers say the final section of bridge deck destined to fill that gap will be bolted into place before the end of June.

When that feat is accomplished, the bridge will form a continuous span over the majestic waterway that flows between Detroit and Windsor, Ont. While the bridge is still more than a year away from opening, the imminent union of its two halves signals a new reality. For the first time in nearly a century, North America’s busiest border crossing is expanding – and it is doing so in grand style.

On the Canadian side, an 220-metre-tall support tower holds up the stay cables that help distribute the load on the bridge deck. A second tower does the same on the U.S. side. Patrick Dell/The Globe and Mail

Using an arrangement of stay cables like these allowed the builders to use less material than a more traditional suspension bridge. Patrick Dell/The Globe and Mail

Once the span is complete, more road-surfacing, electrical and safety work must be done to get the bridge ready for use next fall. Patrick Dell/The Globe and Mail

Paid for entirely by the Canadian government, the $6.4-billion infrastructure project promises to improve the flow of people and goods in a region that has been economically integrated since before the existence of either Canada or the United States. But beyond its practical value, the bridge has already delivered something the river has not seen in more than a generation: a sense of sheer, architectural awe.

“This is our passion,” said Jaime Castro-Maier, lead engineer for the Canadian side of the project, whose bridge-building résumé spans five continents. “I go chasing these types of bridges because I take joy in them. Many of my colleagues do the same.”

This part of the process, in which the bridge deck grows segment by segment from both sides, is like a marathon of construction cycles, he said: “very repetitive, but also very intensive.”

All the while, engineers have measured, monitored and used the tension on the cables to steer the two ends of the bridge toward their eventual meeting point some 10 storeys above the waterline.

“We are within a few millimetres of where we were expecting to be,” Mr. Castro-Maier said of the alignment. “If you look at the magnitude of this construction site and the size of the deck – to talk about millimetres is very rewarding.”

A fine balance

When completed, the Gordie Howe bridge will be the largest in North America to feature a cable-stayed design. In this style, the load of the bridge deck is transferred through multiple cables and balanced on either side of two large towers.

Ambassador Bridge

Detroit River

Detroit

Gordie Howe

International Bridge

Windsor

UNITED STATES

CANADA

500 m

Leg support:

Six 36-metre shafts per leg drilled into bedrock

Stay cables:

216 in total,

108 per side

Pylon

height:

220 m

853 m

Clearance: 46 m

Detroit River

DETROIT

WINDSOR

THE PYLONS

Upper pylon

Transition

Lower

pylon

North

footing

South

footing

THE DECK

Stay cable: Each will have between 38 and 122 metal strands

Redundency

girder

High-density

polyethylene

plastic pipe

Ribs along the pipe prevent ice formation

Floor beam

Precast steel

and concrete

composite slab

Stay cable

anchorage

Edge

girder

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP; WINDSOR-DETROIT BRIDGE AUTHORITY

A fine balance

Ambassador Bridge

Detroit River

Detroit

Gordie Howe

International Bridge

Windsor

UNITED STATES

CANADA

500 m

Leg support:

Six 36-metre shafts per leg drilled into bedrock

Stay cables:

216 in total,

108 per side

Pylon

height:

220 m

853 m

Clearance: 46 m

Detroit River

DETROIT

WINDSOR

THE PYLONS

Upper pylon

Transition

Lower

pylon

North

footing

South

footing

THE DECK

Stay cable: Each will have between 38 and 122 metal strands

Redundency

girder

High-density

polyethylene

plastic pipe

Ribs along the pipe prevent ice formation

Floor beam

Precast steel

and concrete

composite slab

Stay cable

anchorage

Edge

girder

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP; WINDSOR-DETROIT BRIDGE AUTHORITY

A fine balance

Ambassador Bridge

Detroit River

Detroit

Gordie Howe

International Bridge

Windsor

UNITED STATES

CANADA

500 m

853 m

Stay cables:

216 in total,

108 per side

Leg support:

Six 36-metre shafts per leg drilled into bedrock

Longest cable: 450 m

Pylon height:

220 m

Clearance: 46 m

Detroit River

DETROIT

WINDSOR

THE PYLONS

Upper pylon

Transition

Lower pylon

North footing

South footing

THE DECK

Stay cable: Each will have between 38 and 122 metal strands

Precast steel

and concrete

composite slab

Redundency

girder

High-density

polyethylene

plastic pipe

Ribs along the pipe prevent ice formation

Edge

girder

Floor beam

Stay cable

anchorage

MURAT YÜKSELIR / THE GLOBE AND MAIL, SOURCE: OPENSTREETMAP; WINDSOR-DETROIT BRIDGE AUTHORITY

Beauty meets utility

After delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, much still remains to be done to complete the bridge and its associated ports of entry in time for a projected opening in the fall of 2025. But the steady progress of the past year and the near completion of the bridge deck has heightened public interest and created a growing sense of anticipation on both sides of the river.

“We’re seeing social-media comments, we’re seeing how excited the community is about the bridge deck connection taking place. That’s a real inspiration for us,” said Heather Grondin, chief relations officer for the Windsor Detroit Bridge Authority, the Crown corporation that the federal government created a dozen years ago to oversee the project.

One reason for the good vibes is pure aesthetics. The Gordie Howe bridge isn’t just big; it is undeniably striking. Named for the Saskatchewan-born hockey legend who played 25 seasons with the Detroit Red Wings, the structure is supported by towers that rise 220 metres above the surrounding terrain. While the shape of the towers is the supposed nod to hockey, the visual metaphor is not obvious. What does jump out, however, are the fans of 216 stay cables that extend from the towers to the bridge deck. These give the bridge a remarkably airy feel for its size.

Thanks to improvements in materials technology, bridges that employ this form, known as a “cable-stayed” design, have become increasingly common since the beginning of the 21st century. Because the load of the bridge deck can be transferred directly to the ground using a large number of relatively narrow cables that descend symmetrically from tall towers at either end, this approach requires less material to build than more traditional-looking suspension bridges, such as the 95-year-old Ambassador Bridge located five kilometres upstream from the new project.

In addition to greater structural efficiency – or perhaps because of it – a cable-stayed bridge also tends to elicit positive reactions.

“From the public standpoint, it becomes an iconic structure,” said Habib Tabatabai, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. “It really is a beautiful sight to see.”

In the case of the Gordie Howe bridge, the other reason for enthusiasm is a pragmatic one. According to a 2021 report by the University of Windsor’s Cross Border Institute, the privately owned Ambassador Bridge, which is four lanes wide, accounts for 30 per cent of all truck trade between Canada and the U.S., and 19 per cent of bilateral trade over all. Nearby, the Windsor-Detroit tunnel offers only two lanes – one in each direction – and lacks the ceiling height for large trucks.

To say this situation presents a bottleneck would be an understatement. The problem is further magnified in a trade environment where materials and components can cross multiple times on the way to becoming finished products.

With six lanes of traffic, the Gordie Howe bridge will effectively double the size of the region’s cross-border pipeline.

It will also shorten the connection between major highways on either side of the river, offering trucks an alternative to trundling through local streets on their way to the nearest crossing.

In its report, the Cross-Border Institute estimates the cumulative time savings for truck traffic at 850,000 hours a year. This is why the structure about to be joined over the Detroit River “is not an ordinary bridge,” the report’s authors note.

For the cities on either side of the river that have endured economic downturns and other challenges since the glory days of the North American auto industry, it is a monument to optimism.

Only 50 kilometres long but as wide as the Mississippi, the Detroit River is also a strait, and a conduit between the vast reservoirs of the Upper and Lower Great Lakes. Junfu Han/Eric Seals/USA Today Network

European settlement began in earnest in this area thanks to Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac, whose fort became the foundation of modern Detroit. Today, the city has a statue in his honour at Hart Plaza.Raymond Boyd/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Strait ahead

The word “river” is almost a misnomer for the broad and flowing conveyor belt that separates Windsor from Detroit. Only 50 kilometres long but as wide as the Mississippi, it is also a strait – the meaning of the word détroit, in French – and a conduit between the vast reservoirs of the Upper and Lower Great Lakes.

Long used by Indigenous people, who have lived along its banks for millenniums, the river has been a gateway, a highway, a trade route, a conflict zone and a physical and cultural crossroads. It is the New World’s Bosphorus.

French explorers who plied the river in the 17th century were taken with the bounty they saw crowding its banks, including forests filled with game, timber and wild fruits. Compared to Quebec, with its harsh northern winters, the Detroit River’s warmer climate and lush vegetation made it seem like a veritable garden of Eden.

This impression induced adventurer Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac to seek permission from the French crown to establish a fort on the river in 1701, marking the start of the settlement that would become Detroit. In a description penned the following year, Cadillac wrote: “This country, so temperate, so fertile and so beautiful that it may justly be called the earthly paradise of North America, deserves all of the care of the King to keep it up and to attract inhabitants to it.”

Cadillac failed in his bid to create a personal fiefdom on the river and was later demoted to governor of Louisiana. But the appeal for colonists brought more settlers over the next several decades. The French influence continued even after Quebec fell to the British in 1759, and it is evident today in family and place names found up and down the river.

Another profound change came in the aftermath of the American Revolution when Michigan, once claimed by France and then held by Britain, became part of the United States. The bustling waterway that had served as a thoroughfare for Indigenous peoples and for settlers with ties on both sides of the river was to become the dividing line between nations.

But the need to cross it would remain.

Any bridge spanning the Detroit River must be tall enough to allow ships to pass safely beneath it. The meeting point between the U.S. and Canadian halves is the equivalent of 10 storeys above the water. Windsor Detroit Bridge Authority

Before Windsor-Detroit had tunnels or bridges to cross the river, boats would have to ferry cargo in all seasons, as the SS Lansdowne is doing here in winter around 1905.Detroit Publishing Company Photograph Collection

Bridge out of water

Ferries were once a signature feature of life and trade on the Detroit River. Their importance grew once the Great Western Railway reached the Windsor shore in 1854. Here, where the river is at its narrowest, boats were the sole means of transporting railcars back and forth to Detroit for the next 50 years. The pattern changed when the first tunnel under the river was completed by the Michigan Central Railway in 1910. But even as trains began crossing the border below ground, the growing prevalence of the automobile made the idea of a bridge an increasingly appealing proposition.

The challenge then, as now, was building a bridge tall enough to allow for commercial ships going up and down the river. The answer then was to make it a suspension bridge. This design relies on a pair of giant metal cables to support a steel bridge deck. But bridging an expanse as wide as the Detroit River is not a trivial exercise. When the privately owned Ambassador Bridge was completed in 1929 it was the largest suspension bridge in the world.

The quest for a new bridge has been a local epic. Long a topic of discussion in the region, it was officially explored in 2001 when federal, state and provincial governments in both countries joined forces to study potential improvements to cross-border transportation. Among the options rejected in the study was one promoted by the Michigan-based owner of the Ambassador Bridge to twin that structure and join it more directly to Ontario’s Highway 401. This would have required cutting a swath through several Windsor neighbourhoods. Instead, a less disruptive crossing point was selected in 2008, winnowed down from several candidates. Despite a lawsuit and campaign by the old bridge’s owner to thwart the plan, the legal path for the new bridge was cleared by 2013.

After years of debate, authorities agreed on a new site for the bridge, whose name – in honour of hockey legend Gordie Howe – was unveiled in 2015 by Michigan governor Rick Snyder, prime minister Stephen Harper and Mr. Howe's son, Murray.Dave Chidley/The Canadian Press

Now, the question was what kind of bridge to build.

According to Barry Chung, a bridge specialist with AECOM, the engineering company whose design was selected, the key decision that dictated how the project would unfold was to keep it out of the water entirely. That choice averts the need to construct supporting piers within the riverbed, as was done for the Ambassador Bridge a century ago.

“You can imagine the obvious advantages,” he said. In addition to reducing the overall cost of the bridge, “we don’t have any issues with vessel protection or anything like that, because it’s out of the navigation channel.”

The collapse of Baltimore’s Francis Scott Key Bridge when it was struck by a container ship earlier this year illustrates the hazard to bridges whose supports are in the water.

For designers, the trade-off was having to span the full width of the river with towers positioned just more than 850 metres apart. This is approaching the upper limit for a cable-stayed design, which is considered to be about 1,000 metres. A suspension bridge can go longer, but a suspension bridge requires more material and additional anchorage for its cables, which introduces more cost. Instead, AECOM proposed what will be the longest cable-stayed bridge in North America.

The bridge’s road deck, which news media got to tour for the first time on May 14, will eventually carry six lanes of traffic, effectively doubling cross-border transit and saving truckers time between journeys. Patrick Dell/The Globe and Mail

On deck

One breezy afternoon last month I visited the construction site of the Gordie Howe bridge in Windsor and ascended through a temporary lift to the bridge deck. There, I could walk out over the river as far as the gap, where I watched workers on the U.S. side a mere stone’s throw away.

“You see them closer and closer every day,” said Manuel Bello, a field engineer. “It’s pretty rare to work on a project that’s in between two countries.”

Once the connection is made, the two separate worlds of the bridge will become one – a change that will see border agencies from both countries setting up shop at the project, and require workers to have their passports or other suitable identification at hand.

The bundled stay cables that hold up the deck are still partly exposed. Each consists of dozens of finger-thick strands that would stretch across the entirety of Canada if laid end to end. In addition to giving the bridge its signature look, the close spacing of the cables is an important structural feature, said Mamdouh El-Badry, a professor of civil engineering at the University of Calgary.

“That is unique for cable-stayed bridges,” Dr. El-Badry said. “They allow for a longer span while at the same time they allow for a shallow deck.”

The stay cables are made up of dozens of strands that, if stretched end to end, could reach across Canada. The deck they support is made from a composite of steel and concrete.Patrick Dell/The Globe and Mail

The bulk of the Gordie Howe bridge deck is made of a steel and concrete composite material that sits within a girder frame only 2.7 metres in depth from bottom to its top surface. The overall effect is a bridge that looks ribbon-thin from a distance and seems to hover above the water.

Far below, small fishing boats cluster near the bridge, looking to see what is biting under the vast overhanging structure that has fast become a part of the local landscape. Patrol boats associated with the project nudge them away if they get too close to being under the active construction site up on the deck.

During the Industrial Revolution, the construction of large truss bridges made of heavy steel girders became a symbol of humanity’s conquest over the barriers imposed by geography. They convey a sense of bringing order to an unruly world.

For those who are among the first to cross the Gordie Howe International Bridge when it opens next year, the experience of looking down over the grey-blue waters of the ancient river and the cities on either side may evoke a different feeling – one not unlike the exhilaration of flight.

Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the spelling of University of Wisconsin professor Habib Tabatabai's name.

Editor’s note: The “Bridging the waters” infographic in this article has been updated to depict the locations of bridges that vehicles can use to cross the Canada-U.S. border. It does not include other large bridges in the region.