What makes most Rakowiecki remarkable is that its working skeleton arrived here after serving another project. Its principal structural members were fabricated in 1904 for a bridge over the City Canal, at what is now the western Warsaw Bridge. In 1928, those members were dismantled, transported, and installed here as this bridge’s supporting structure.
You are on Na Niskich Łąkach Street, where this road bridge crosses the Oława. It connects the Oławskie suburb on the river’s left bank with the Rakowiec area on the right. From the sidewalk, take a moment to notice the bridge’s straightforward industrial outline.
It has one span, carried by two parallel-chord lattice girders joined with rivets; the roadway passes between them. Concrete abutments support the deck, and granite setts form the road surface beneath passing wheels. The bridge is 27.6 metres long and 15.66 metres wide.
Its 8.05-metre carriageway is accompanied by a two-metre pavement on each outer side of the trusses. This modest crossing is also a carefully reused piece of Wrocław’s early twentieth-century engineering.
