... and now the last Seine bridges!

We have now reached the last episode of bridge serial. Five bridges are missing: Pont Mirabeau, Pont de Grenelle, Pont du Garigliano, Pont de Tolbiac and Pont National. (There are actually two more, the ones used by the circular road, the “Périphérique”… and I will briefly mention them.)

This is where you can find the missing ones (coming back to the original plan, see the white circles):
I already made a post about Pont Mirabeau, so just a few words. As we are now already quite distant from what used to be the centre of the city, this bridge which dates from 1896 is the first one here. When it was constructed it was the longest and highest of the Paris bridges ... and I think it’s still one of the most beautiful ones. For a French citizen the name of the bridge is closely linked to a famous poem by Guillaume Appolinaire: “Sous le Pont Mirabeau coule la Seine...” (Under the Mirabeau Bridge flows the Seine...”). The bridge got its name from the Count de Mirabeau, one of the Revolution personalities. The top picture shows the Pont Mirabeau in the front line, followed by Pont Rouelle and Pont de Bir-Hakeim.
The Pont de Grenelle is recent (1966), replacing a first one from 1873. As Pont de Bir-Hakeim (see previous post) and Pont Rouelle (see previous post) it crosses the Ile des Cygnes (Swan Island) at its southern end where you also find the Paris copy of the Statue of Liberty (see previous posts), a gift by the Paris American colony in 1889, looking in the direction of its bigger sister.

The bridge got its name from the close-by Grenelle area and street. (Grenelle comes from the Latin word Garanella, meaning a wooded area with rabbits.)
Also Pont du Garigliano is a modern bridge (1966). Here you found earlier a bridge from 1865 in two levels, similar to Pont de Bercy (see previous post), the second level used by the 19th century circular railway (“Petite Ceinture”, see previous post). It was called Viaduc d’Auteuil or Point-du-Jour. No trains pass here anymore. The previous bridge was bombed twice, once in 1870, and a second time, as the only Paris bridge during WW II, in 1943. The name of the present bridge comes from another battle victory, a more recent one, in Italy in 1944.

The bridge has recently got a special decoration, a “Telephone Both” designed by Frank O. Gehry (see previous post). This was linked to an attempt to create temporary art along the new Paris tramway line (see previous post), which has one of its temporary end points here.
We are now going far upstream to the Pont de Tolbiac from 1882. It was the first bridge here and was needed because of a too long distance between the surrounding bridges. The bridge got its name from a battle – once more – but a very ancient one, in 496 (Tulpiacum, probably Zülpich in North Rhine-Westphalia nowadays).

On the northern, right bank, the bridge brings you to the Bercy Park (see previous post). An aeroplane belonging to the Free Forces crashed close to the bridge in 1943 after having been hit by the German forces.
The (almost) last bridge will be Pont National. It was originally, in 1853, built also to take care of the rail traffic for the “Petite Ceinture” under the name Pont Napoleon III, but here road and rail ran side by side. You can still see the now abandoned rails. In 1870 it got its present name (Napoleon III was not anymore in grace). It was widened during the war years, opened in 1944 with its present width.

A lot of transformation takes place at the moment between Pont de Tolbiac and Pont National, restructuring a previous very industrial area.
To finish with the Seine bridges I would just like to mention and show the two bridges that were built for the ring road, the “Périphérique”, completed in 1973. The one to the right is upstream, the one to the left downstream.
(I trust that I have now covered all the bridges!!)

You can find these pictures “in full” and as a slide show on Ipernity.

After this bridge series I need a weekend! I hope that yours will be nice!