The Blue Water Bridge

Stand anywhere along the Port Huron waterfront and you can’t miss it: the Blue Water Bridge, arcing high over the St. Clair River to carry traffic between Michigan and Canada. It’s one of the busiest international crossings on the whole U.S.-Canada border, and it’s the city’s signature landmark.

Look closely and you’ll see it’s really two bridges side by side. The first one opened in 1938, a graceful steel truss that was a marvel in its day. By the 1990s it couldn’t keep up with the traffic, so a second span, built in a sleeker arch style, opened alongside it in 1997. Today one span carries cars west into Michigan and the other carries them east into Ontario, with the international border running right down the middle.

The bridge rises high enough for thousand-foot freighters to pass underneath on their way between Lake Huron and the lower lakes, so you’ll often catch a ship sliding beneath it. Long before the bridge, trains were already crossing between the two countries through a tunnel dug under the river in 1891, the first full-size tunnel ever built beneath a river in North America. That’s how long Port Huron has been a doorway between two countries.