Photo: Jeff Grundman
To help ease the congestion between Mercedes- Benz Stadium, home of the National Football League’s Atlanta Falcons and Major League Soccer’s Atlanta United FC, and the closest transit station, an elevated pedestrian bridge was built over a busy street, Northside Drive. This allows the safe movement of large volumes of pedestrians to and from the stadium without disrupting the already congested traffic around game time.
The space available for the bridge was relatively small and the elevation required to go above traffic relatively high. Rather than build a short bridge with steep inclines or stairs or escalators that would act as bottlenecks, CallisonRTKL designed 260 feet of long looping ramps of gradual slope.
The bridge structure was built by Georgia Bridge and Concrete LLC, and they also served as general contractor.
In keeping with the modern open design of the stadium itself, Henry Inc. clad the bridge in angular panels of perforated metal, supported by a crisscrossing network of framing bars and a series of roll-formed metal arches. Henry also provided lighted fencing lining the ramps, the cladding on the bridge supports and two decorative sculptures at the west entrance of the ramp.
For the bridge tunnel, Henry fabricated and installed aluminum sheet, aluminum plate, aluminum I-beam, rolled, oval cross section, and hardware and anchors.
For hand rails, posts and fencing, the company used aluminum square tube, aluminum tubing, perforated, aluminum sheet, post caps, LEDs internal to fabricated posts, stainless steel handrail and stainless steel hardware and anchors. All of the aluminum is powder coated.
