Melbourne Causeway and the 1921 Indian River Bridge — Melbourne, Florida

The first road crossing of the Indian River at Melbourne opened in 1921. The Olde History of Melbourne by Weona Cleveland, published by the Genealogical Society of South Brevard, states that the first bridge across the Indian River at Melbourne was erected in 1921, the same year W.T. Wells gave the city the land that became Wells Park. The span ran from the Front Street waterfront east to Indialantic, the subdivision its builder was trying to sell.

Before 1921 the beaches east of Melbourne were reached by boat. The Indian River Lagoon National Scenic Byway entry on the Melbourne Beach Pier says a ferry service operated by the Beaujean family between 1889 and 1923, together with a pier railroad, gave the most practicable access to the island. The same entry credits the toll bridge between Melbourne and Indialantic in 1921 with ending the pier's role as the island's landing. The Town of Melbourne Beach history tells the same story from the beach side: winter visitors came over on Beaujean's ferry until the toll bridge to Indialantic was built after World War I.

Melbourne had bridged smaller waters earlier. Cleveland's history notes that the first bridge across the Eau Gallie River dates to 1895, and that a wooden bridge over the St. Johns River west of Melbourne went up in 1915 and washed out in a 1924 storm. The Indian River crossing at Eau Gallie came later: the local history quoted by Roads to the Future dates the first bridge there, built by Grover Fletcher, to February 22, 1926, five years after the Melbourne span.

The builder was Ernest Kouwen-Hoven, the developer of Indialantic-by-the-Sea. Space Coast Daily (November 28, 2022), drawing on Brevard County Historical Society images, reports that he came south from Chicago with his family to Melbourne in 1915, bought a strip of land between the Indian River and the Atlantic, and recorded the first map of the Indialantic subdivision in 1916. With the island reachable only by boat or ferry, he started a wooden bridge from Melbourne in 1919.

Public money was not available. Indialantic Heritage records that Kouwen-Hoven financed the work himself, selling bonds for $100 each, with another $20 buying a lot, and cutting lumber at his own portable sawmills 16 miles west of Melbourne and on Merritt Island. It gives the finished bridge as 1 7/8 miles long and its final cost as more than $100,000. The same history reports that land sales on the island soared once the bridge opened, with cleared 50 by 100 foot Indialantic lots selling for $400 to $1,000 each.

Skeptics in Melbourne gave the project a name. Space Coast Daily writes that it became known as Kouwen-Hoven's Folly because of predictions it would never be completed, and the Melbourne Beach Historical Trail text quoted by Roads to the Future says residents expected the bridge to end wherever construction paused. The trail text dates the start to 1919 and completion to April of 1921.

The CAUSEWAY historical marker text reproduced by Roads to the Future describes a narrow structure: the bridge was 16 feet wide, the steel draw was operated by hand, and opening and closing it took 14 minutes in all. Kouwen-Hoven collected a toll of 10 cents from motorists and enforced a 10 MPH speed limit. The same page gives the Kouwen-Hoven bridge a length of 9,706 feet.

Night crossings had their own hazards. Space Coast Daily reports that the Melbourne bridge was lighted by kerosene lanterns and was often set afire when lanterns were blown or knocked over, and that drivers carried hammers to pound loose nails back into the planks. The Melbourne Beach Historical Trail text blames fishermen for knocking over many of the lamps.

The bridge also changed the mainland street plan. Roads to the Future records that in July 1921 Melbourne paved New Haven Avenue from the railroad east to the bridge, and calls it Melbourne's first paved street. Melbourne Main Street links the same years to the rise of a new commercial district on New Haven Avenue during the 1920s Land Boom, after the 1919 fire on Front Street.

By the late 1930s the wooden bridge belonged to the State Road Department and needed replacing, according to the Indian River Journal (Fall 2002) excerpt quoted by Roads to the Future. Planners proposed a causeway on fill to cut maintenance costs. Space Coast Daily reports that a new concrete and steel swing bridge was begun in 1941, that construction was delayed with the onset of World War II, and that it was completed in 1947.

The 1947 Melbourne crossing was a two lane causeway with a swing span that cleared about 20 feet over the water when closed, according to Florida Department of Transportation correspondence summarized by Roads to the Future. Most of its length sat on earthen fill in the Indian River, the pattern the causeway still follows. The marker text adds that the old wooden bridge was torn down once the 1947 bridge was finished.

The Indian River Journal excerpt connects the new causeway to the growth that followed in Brevard County: it opened in time to carry Space Program traffic from the Melbourne mainland to Patrick Air Force Base, and a new housing boom in Indialantic followed.

The present Melbourne Causeway took shape in two stages. Roads to the Future, citing FDOT, records that the westbound two lane high-level bridge opened in 1978, while eastbound traffic stayed on the 1947 swing bridge, and that the eastbound high-level bridge opened in 1985, after which the 1947 bridge was demolished. The earthen causeway was widened and new relief bridges were built near each shoreline during that work.

The AARoads U.S. 192 guide gives the dimensions: the Melbourne Causeway spans the Atlantic Intracoastal Waterway on a 2,593 foot long bridge with 65 feet of vertical clearance, the eastbound crossing dating to 1985. AARoads also records that the Florida Legislature dedicated the Intracoastal Waterway bridges as the Ernest Kouwen-Hoven Memorial Bridge in 1978, so the builder's name passed from the wooden toll bridge to the concrete spans.

East of the main span, the road drops onto a pair of manmade islands and crosses two relief bridges over Indian River channels; AARoads notes both were rebuilt in 2010. U.S. 192 then enters Indialantic on 5th Avenue and ends at SR A1A beside James H. Nance Park. On the Melbourne side, New Haven Avenue east is the pre-1985 alignment of U.S. 192 to Melbourne Causeway, and today U.S. 192 joins New Haven Avenue at the west end of the causeway.

The mainland landing sits at Front Street. The City of Melbourne Parks Directory places Claude Edge Front Street Park on Front Street along the Indian River in Downtown Melbourne at the base of the Melbourne Causeway, next to the Front Street Civic Center. The Downtown Melbourne parks list includes access to the Melbourne Causeway walking and biking path among that park's amenities, along with a public boat ramp and fishing pier.

AARoads lists the Melbourne Causeway as part of the Indian River Lagoon Florida Scenic Highway. The route over the lagoon, laid out first by a developer's private toll bridge in 1921, rebuilt on fill in 1947 and lifted over the Intracoastal Waterway between 1978 and 1985, remains the direct link between Downtown Melbourne and the Indialantic and Melbourne Beach shore.