02/19/2026
ICONIC BLACK HAWK BRIDGE BEGINS ITS AFTERLIFE - Pieces of the demolished but much loved old Lansing bridge that connected Iowa with Wisconsin for 94 years have been moved to a staging spot upriver at Alter Metal Recycling in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Its pieces—cut into chunks no longer than four feet at the Lansing site—arrive here by truck and are unloaded into piles. Picture the mound shown here times 75, says Andy Polhamus, facility manager at the La Crosse Alter plant. As Galen Crozier, a quality and compliance executive with Alter, sensitively describes it, “The bridge doesn’t die, it changes its life.” From here, lifted piece by piece into trucks by a giant magnet and crane, the bridge chunks head to foundries. They are melted down to become their next incarnations, which could be anything metal—steel rebar, or a car, or even a lowly but useful paper clip.
