Bessemer Super Highway

This article is about the highway, for the hip hop album, see 2Lue.

Bessemer Super Highway (or Bessemer Superhighway, originally the Birmingham-Bessemer Boulevard) is the section of U. S. Highway 11 connecting the cities of Bessemer and Birmingham.

The four-lane highway replaced a circuitous route through West End, Powderly and Lipscomb with numerous railroad crossings. It was designed by Alabama State Highway Department engineers who used the German Autobahn system as a model. The chosen route followed a nearly straight line between the Alabama State Fairgrounds at Five Points West to 19th Street in the heart of downtown Bessemer.

As the project proceeded, many of the rail lines along the route were elevated steel and concrete trestles to bridge over the highway. Tthe new highway itself was raised onto a long viaduct, later named the Mary Bryant Bridge, as it crossed over rail yards on the way into Bessemer.

Due to the shortage of funds prevailing during the Great Depression, the State set aside plans to build large interchanges that would allow for limited freeway access. Had it been built according to the initial designs, the Bessemer Super Highway would have been distinguished, ahead of the Merritt Parkway in Connecticut and the Pennsylvania Turnpike, as the first freeway in the United States. In 1940 the highway department did install lighting along the entire route, thus creating what was, at the time, the longest "white way" east of the Rocky Mountains.

The Super Highway, as it quickly came to be known, spurred the development of new businesses catering to the driving public in the post-World War II boom. The corridor's economic growth continued nearly unabated until the completion of I-59/20.