The high green truss that has connected Duluth and Superior since 1961 will carry its last vehicle in February or March of next year, and will not be replaced until the autumn of 2031.
Minnesota and Wisconsin transportation officials unveiled the design for the new Blatnik Bridge on Wednesday, the latest step in a $1.815 billion replacement that has been in preliminary design since 2023. The existing bridge closes completely at the start of the construction window. There is no phased closure, no single lane held open, no temporary span. For four to five years, one of the two direct road links between the Twin Ports simply will not be there.
Roughly 33,000 vehicles use it every day.
What is being built
The new span will be a tied arch, carried on V-shaped supports rising from the piers. The agencies chose it over a cable-stayed design that would have put structure into the airspace above a working shipping channel, and the switch saves an estimated $400 million.
Two details are worth knowing beyond the aesthetics. The new piers will stand 720 feet apart rather than the current 600, which matters to the vessels moving under them. And the deck is designed with no expansion joints across a 2,000-foot run, which is a direct answer to the water infiltration that has been eating the current structure from the joints outward for decades.
The new bridge will also carry something the old one never did: a separated path for people on foot and on bikes, with rest areas along the span. In a region that treats the Lakewalk and the Osaugie Trail as core infrastructure, a walkable crossing of St. Louis Bay is a genuine addition rather than a decoration.
The money and the schedule
Funding is settled, which is why the schedule is real. The federal share of $1.05 billion was announced released in March 2026 after a delay in disbursement, with Minnesota and Wisconsin each committing $400 million. The two departments are running the job as a design-build contract, awarded in July to Ames-Kraemer Joint Venture II, the partnership behind the recently completed Twin Ports Interchange in Duluth. The bid submitted in late June was about $930 million for construction.
The published sequence runs roughly like this. Closure and demolition begin in early 2027, with removal of the main span through the following fall and winter. Pile driving runs from mid-2027 to spring 2029. Deck construction runs from late 2028 to mid-2031. The new bridge opens in October 2031, with cleanup and landscaping into 2032.
Anyone who has watched a project of this scale knows to hold those dates loosely. The closure date is the one to plan around, because it is the one that arrives first and the one that does not slip in your favor.
Where the traffic goes
To the Bong Bridge, overwhelmingly.
The Richard I. Bong Memorial Bridge carries U.S. Highway 2 between West Duluth and Superior's Itasca area, about four miles down the bay from the Blatnik. It is the designated alternative and it will absorb the great majority of displaced traffic. Superior begins repaving Winter Street in September 2026 specifically to handle what is coming, and a new Superior interchange built with roundabouts will tie the eventual new bridge into U.S. Highway 53.
The third crossing is the Oliver Bridge, carrying Wisconsin Highway 105 and Minnesota Highway 39 across the river far upstream near Gary-New Duluth. It is a useful route for a narrow band of households at the western end of Duluth and for the village of Oliver itself, and it closes for scheduled inspection for several days most summers. It is not a meaningful relief valve for a downtown-to-downtown commute.
What that means in practice: the trip from Superior's North End or downtown to Duluth's Canal Park and downtown, currently a short hop over the Blatnik, becomes a run down Belknap or Tower to Highway 2, over the Bong, and back up Interstate 35 through the west side. On a clear day it is a longer drive. At 7:45 on a February morning with everyone else doing the same thing, it is a different commute entirely.
What it means for housing on both sides
Duluth and Superior function as one housing market with a state line through it, and the case for the Wisconsin side has always rested substantially on price. Superior offers larger lots, lower entry prices, and Wisconsin property tax and income tax treatment, in exchange for a bridge.
From early 2027, the bridge is the Bong Bridge. That does not eliminate the case for Superior, and anyone telling you it does is overreaching. What it does is change the arithmetic for a specific group of buyers: households whose daily destination is downtown Duluth, the medical district on the hillside, or the university campuses, and who were pricing that commute at fifteen minutes.
Three practical recommendations for anyone shopping right now.
Drive the detour, not the route. A commute test in 2026 over the Blatnik tells you nothing about 2027 through 2031. Drive from the actual address to the actual workplace by way of the Bong Bridge, in the morning, in bad weather if you can arrange it.
Weigh the Superior neighborhoods differently. Billings Park, South Superior and the Itasca and Allouez side sit closer to the Bong Bridge approach than the North End and downtown do. During the closure, that geography inverts the usual convenience ranking within Superior itself.
Expect business disruption, and read it as temporary. Downtown Superior's commercial district takes traffic off the Blatnik approach. A regional business association has already been surveying consumer spending patterns ahead of the closure specifically to anticipate this, and Superior city councilors have raised helping affected small businesses and keeping the public informed as 2027 budget priorities. Some storefronts will not survive five years of rerouted traffic. That is a real cost to the district and a poor reason to write off a neighborhood you would otherwise buy in, because the bridge does come back.
The long view
It is worth stating the other half of this plainly. In 2032 the Twin Ports will have a new interstate crossing with a fifty-year service life, a wider shipping gap beneath it, a modern interchange on the Superior end, and a walking and cycling connection between two downtowns that has never existed. The Twin Ports Interchange in Duluth was a similar bargain: years of disruption in exchange for infrastructure that will outlast everyone arguing about it.
The five years in between are the part you have to plan for. If you are buying a house in the Twin Ports in the next eighteen months, the closure date belongs on the same page of your notes as the inspection and the tax statement.
Reported from Superior Telegram and Duluth News Tribune coverage and the Minnesota and Wisconsin departments of transportation.