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Lansing bridge over the Mississippi will close Monday, with opening of new bridge more than a year away
The Iowa DOT is planning to offer a free car ferry across the river, but it won’t start running until next month
The Gazette
Oct. 17, 2025 2:20 pm
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The Black Hawk Bridge across the Mississippi River at Lansing in northeast Iowa will close for good Monday morning — more than a year before its replacement is scheduled to open.
The Iowa Department of Transportation announced a ferry service will begin next month to move people and vehicles from one side of the river to the other, but in the meantime, residents, workers and others who need to cross the river will have to travel 70 miles out of the way to the next-closest bridge.
More than 2,200 cars a day cross the historic bridge, which connects Lansing with rural Crawford County in Wisconsin. Construction on a replacement bridge began in November 2023. It is scheduled to be complete in the spring of 2027.
The Iowa DOT announced this month’s planned closure in July, saying it will allow for demolition of the Black Hawk Bridge so the new bridge can be safely constructed.
The new bridge is being built just feet from the existing bridge so construction has “the least impact possible on local cultural and environmental resources,” the Iowa DOT has said.
The Black Hawk Bridge, which opened as a toll road in 1931, has been closed twice before during construction of the new bridge. Once, in February 2024 after some of its piers shifted, likely because of construction of the new bridge, and again in May of this year due to sensor-detected movement.
During the 2024 closure, which lasted nearly two months, the state offered a ferry service to shuttle people — but not their vehicles — across the river. The department estimated the cost of providing the seven-day-a-week water taxi service, operated by a tour company from Marquette, was $255,000.
In a news release published last week by the Iowa DOT, the state agency said it is working with the Wisconsin Department of Transportation to initiate a free car ferry starting in early November “to provide alternative service until the new bridge is projected to open in spring 2027.”
The gap between the Black Hawk Bridge’s closure and the start of the ferry service is due to “managing schedules, acquiring environmental clearances, and providing a safe environment for those who use the bridge, rail and river traffic, and our contractors,” according to a comment posted by the Iowa DOT on its Mississippi River Bridge at Lansing Facebook page.
“We are very pleased that federal and state agencies, including the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and the city of Lansing, could work together and quickly approve the necessary steps to allow us to provide this critical service,” Iowa DOT Director Scott Marler said in a news release. “These approvals will allow us to install the infrastructure needed for a car ferry to keep our communities connected when the old bridge needs to be closed.”
Previous closures of the Black Hawk Bridge have affected merchants in the area, causing drops in sales, they told The Gazette. They also have complicated travel for the people who must cross the river for work, shopping and other trips. One man told The Gazette he sometimes slept in his car because the free water taxi across the Mississippi ended service too early after he got off work late in Wisconsin and he had to return to a farm near Lansing. A drive to the next closest bridge across the Mississippi is about 35 miles away, and then 35 miles back.