Mike Elder, perched on a ladder in the heat of a July afternoon, calmly added details to a mural taking shape on the concrete walls around the notorious Independence Avenue Bridge. Suddenly, a large fuel truck blew by, its driver determined to make it under the bridge’s 12-foot-tall clearance.
“He pulled up, he stopped, and I tell him, ‘Yeah, you're not going to make it,’” Elder remembered with a grim smile.
Undeterred, the driver pulled closer to the bridge, stepped out of the cab, and stood on the back of his truck, eyeballing the distance between the bottom of the bridge and the top of his trailer.
“Meanwhile, all the traffic behind him stops for, you know, a mile,” Elder said.
The whole drama took about five minutes, and Elder said the driver resigned himself to backing up, which caused even more chaos.
It’s a common scene for people who spend time in the area where Independence and Topping avenues intersect. The railroad bridge here has caused headaches for decades.
It was built in 1912, before the era of oversized trucks. Since 2020, some 40 trucks have collided with the bridge, according to police. That’s despite street signs to warn drivers, and a new alert system installed this year.
Now, four new murals created by local artists will help transform Kansas City's infamous truck-eating bridge into a work of art.
The $17,0000 project, funded by a ReBuild KC neighborhood grant, is part of a city and railroad effort to make visual, lighting and safety improvements to the area.
The Northeast Kansas City Chamber of Commerce announced in June the muralists selected to transform the historic bridge. The artists are trying to complete the painting by early August.
A reputation for destruction
For the bridge’s many fans, its appeal is inextricably intertwined with schadenfreude.
The bridge has a fan page on Facebook with more than 20,000 followers, and multiple accounts on the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. The bridge is emblazoned on T-shirts and is the subject of at least one tattoo.
But will the new murals make truck drivers think twice?
“I don't think anybody really believes that,” Elder said. “But the idea is to bring attention to the bridge, and attention to the neighborhood.”
Elder’s painting imagines a doomed truck spilling its load of Kansas City souvenirs. There’s a crushed bottle of barbeque sauce, a pair of shuttlecocks, a soccer ball and more. Grasping the truck with its long, elastic tongue is a giant, amethyst-colored amphibian that pokes out from its lair beneath the bridge.
“I just envisioned this monster hiding out, almost like a huge frog kind of a thing, just sucking in these guys that don't pay attention,” Elder said. “When the opportunity came up to do this mural, the first thing I thought was, ‘Well, obviously there's a troll that lives under there.’”
On the bridge’s southeast wall, sisters Michelle Renn and Merry Burleson have painted fanciful, winged trucks fluttering just above the grasp of freakishly-large, carnivorous plants. They call their mural “Venus Fly Truck.”
“They're kind of these evil looking Venus flytraps with their mouths open, drooling, ready to catch trucks,” Renn said.
Nearby, Brian Mapes, who creates art under the name Become More, tackled one of the walls with a series of colorful, undersea creatures, including a sinister-looking octopus reaching for angelfish-shaped trucks.
“There has been a lot of excitement from the community, people constantly walking by saying that they love it,” Mapes said. “There's a lot of people that walk past the bridge every single day, so there's a lot of people who are going to enjoy it.”
Alex Eickhoff’s wall features a blue-green hippo preparing to snack on a truck.
“It's going to change the environment significantly and draw attention to it, whether or not trucks have time to slow down,” Eickhoff said. “It's already notorious, but hopefully that just adds to the legend and increases its reputation.”
Elder said some people have already shown their appreciation.
“It surprises me every time when somebody drives by and honks their horn, or yells out the window and gives us a thumbs up as they're going by,” Elder said. “Or a guy walking on his way to work just tells us, ‘Hey man, that looks really great.’”
The Northeast Kansas City Chamber of Commerce will host a mural reveal celebration at 11:45 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 24, at Taqueria Mexico 2, 5920 Independence Ave., Kansas City, Missouri, 64125. For more information visit NEKCChamber.com.
