The bridge is partly responsible for the $60 million condo project on Nebraska’s riverfront. Bluffs Mayor Tom Hanafan believes the bridge will lead to similar development on the Iowa side of the river.

But the bridge is more than an economic development tool or a new place for recreation.

“It has all the features of Omaha’s postcard,” said former Mayor Hal Daub. “It gives us sizzle.”

Sizzle may be the correct word, especially at night, as the bridge’s 200-foot-tall, three-sided towers are bathed in light. The cables that hold the bridge 52 feet above the river will also be lighted.

Omaha needs some sizzle because right now Omahans consider their city dowdy. In a world where metro areas compete for people and jobs, beauty counts.

The Gallup Organization surveyed urban residents around the country last year. Residents were asked to rate the “beauty and physical setting” of their city.

Only 15 percent of Omahans rated their city “very good” for its beauty and physical setting. Its peer cities – Austin, Texas; Minneapolis; Portland, Ore.; Raleigh-Durham, N.C.; and Salt Lake City – gave their cities a combined 59 percent for beauty.

Gallup’s Steve Schulz said beauty is an important part of “what attracts people to a city and why they stay.” His Omaha office overlooks the Missouri River on Gallup University’s new campus.

“We have a natural resource that will be leveraged by the bridge,” Schulz said.

Schulz and others say Omahans don’t appreciate the city’s attractive elements.

Design has been important to downtown Omaha’s renaissance. It can be seen in the graceful rise of the First National Tower, the dramatic atrium in the new Union Pacific headquarters and in the undulating roof line of the new convention center etched in blue lights and the tilted eyebrow roof on the new arena.

“The bridge appears to me as a piece of art,” said Omaha Mayor Mike Fahey. He compared it to the geodesic Desert Dome at the Henry Doorly Zoo, which appears behind centerfield during broadcasts of the College World Series.

“Those types of large pieces of art differentiate your city,” Fahey said. “This brings more allure to downtown.”

It’s probably overreaching to compare the pedestrian bridge to the St. Louis Arch, a national monument towering 630 feet over that riverfront. The bridge will not dominate the Omaha skyline as the Arch does in St. Louis.

“We wanted to complement everything else that is going on,” said Chris Brown, who was raised in Omaha and is the project manager for the bridge designer HNTB of Kansas City, Mo.

Brown has watched Omaha’s downtown and riverfront change in ways that leave Kansas City residents envious.

More than $650 million in public and private dollars have transformed Omaha’s riverfront.

Greg Peterson, a former city planner who is a consultant on the bridge project, has been involved with the back-to-the-river movement since plans were hatched for the Gene Leahy Mall in 1971.

“Each piece adds something,” Peterson said.

Perhaps the most important move came in early 1995, three days into Daub’s first administration.

At 5:30 in the evening, Peterson got a call from the new mayor. Peterson was to come down from his 11^th-floor office to the mayor’s third-floor suite.

The elevator stopped at the eighth floor, and Ken Bunger, an assistant city attorney, stepped on.

Daub’s message to both men was simple. He wanted the century-old Asarco battery plant gone and modern development in its place.

Today, it’s hard to recall that the old industrial plant once stood where Lewis & Clark Landing and Rick’s Café Boatyard now welcome jazz enthusiasts on summer nights. Taking down Asarco opened the way for the Qwest Center Omaha to be built on old Union Pacific yards.

Development marched north with the rusting tanks at the Omaha Docks replaced by the National Park Service building, the Riverfront Place condos and the soon-to-be started pedestrian bridge.

Gallup then decided it wanted to locate where Aaron Ferer & Sons had processed scrap metal for decades.

The bridge marks the final piece of the riverfront puzzle for Omaha. Now the emphasis is on spreading west from the river into the north downtown are between Cuming Street and Interstate 480.

Council Bluffs and Omaha have followed different paths to development along the river. The Bluffs used Ameristar and Harvey’s – now Harrah’s – casinos to set things in motion a decade ago.

Now the Bluffs is turning to a different kind of recreational activity with improvements to the golf course, new bike trails, park land and new apartments at the site of the former Frito-Lay plant.

Hanafan said a nature park is planned between the riverbank and the levee. The bridge would land on top of the levee.

With all the talk of the bridge as an icon and Omaha’s new postcard, the likelihood that it will be a people magnet could be overlooked.

The cable-stay bridge will be unique on the Missouri River.

People will flock to it for bike rides or just to stroll halfway across and stand over the river, predicted Brown, the bridge designer.

The impact will be dramatic, he said, comparing Omaha’s new pedestrian bridge to the Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge leading into Boston. When that bridge opened in 2002, nearly 250,000 people went to take a look.

World-Herald staff writer Tom Shaw contributed to this report.

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