4. David Steinman, the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Bridge designer, was a prolific poet

David Steinman in front of Mackinac Bridge. Image from Wikimedia by Ciraric.

The bridge’s designer, David Barnard Steinman, was a civil engineer who designed over 400 bridges and a prolific poet. Not surprisingly, Steinman wrote several poems about bridges. Perhaps his most notable line is “a bridge is a poem stretched across a river, a symphony of stone and steel.” 

His poems describe the scenes and sounds of bridge construction and focus on bridges as metaphors for faith, hope, and courage. Steinman invokes God, the natural world, and the nature of humans in his poems. In the poem “Blueprint,” Steinman portrays a “clairvoyant” bridge-builder reflecting on the “magic” he has created.