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DULUTH — One last splash of concrete, and the long saga of the Twin Ports Interchange rebuild is finally starting to look like the home stretch.
MnDOT says the final bridge deck pour — a beast of a job that caps nearly 145,000 cubic yards of concrete and 4,600-plus tons of steel — is set for tonight. After that, it’s polish and paint time: sealing the surface, pouring medians, throwing up barriers, brushing on some fresh bridge colors, and lining the thing like a big new toy waiting to be unboxed.
This last deck pour isn’t just symbolic — it’s the literal capstone of a yearslong, painfully slow (but necessary) reimagining of Duluth’s most tangled traffic knot. Out with the blind merges and crumbling overpasses. In with safer, saner on-ramps and smoother freight routes that actually make sense for a modern port town.
If everything holds, the I-35 and Highway 53 connection should be wide open by the first week of November. After that, maybe — just maybe — we can start seeing I-35 through Lincoln Park as more than a never-ending construction zone. Maybe even a road you want to take.
Stranger things have happened.
