For a few years before 2023, the first Saturday of every month meant something different on the Long-Allen Bridge. Morgan City and Berwick closed it to cars and opened it to people instead, no exhaust, no traffic, just the long climb up the old steel truss and back down the other side. People showed up. Not a handful. Enough that when the bridge finally closed for a rehabilitation that stretched to three years, officials on both sides of the river already had an answer to a question nobody had spent a dollar asking: would anyone actually use this bridge for feet instead of tires. The answer was yes, and it's the reason the trail plan set to reopen this fall looks the way it does.
The Long-Allen Bridge has carried LA 182 over the Atchafalaya River since 1933, built by the Mount Vernon Bridge Company out of Ohio. Its three main K-truss spans are, according to the preservation group historicbridges.org, the longest known K-truss spans in the country. It closed for repairs in May 2023, and local reporting through this summer points to a fall reopening, with some officials floating November as the likely month. That's a longer stretch without the crossing than most residents expected when the barricades first went up.
The Data Nobody Called Data
During the years before that closure, Morgan City and Berwick agreed to shut the bridge to vehicle traffic on the first Saturday of each month, opening it exclusively to walkers and cyclists. Nobody framed it as research. There was no survey, no consultant hired to count heads at the crest of the span. But the people who kept showing up for those monthly walks became, without anyone naming it this way, a real field test of whether this exact crossing between these exact two towns would draw foot and bike traffic on its own, or whether it just sounded good in a planning document.
Then the 2023 closure cut the experiment short before anyone had formalized what it showed. A St. Mary Now report on Berwick's council meeting this summer captured the irony directly: the popular monthly bridge walks had been interrupted by an unpopular bridge closure. Three years later, the fall reopening isn't just restoring car access. It's restoring the crossing that already proved, one Saturday at a time, that people would use it on foot.
What's Already Paved
None of this starts from zero. Berwick built the parish's first dedicated walking trail years ago, a 4.2-mile paved path residents already use daily for exercise, for the dog, or just to get outside. On the Morgan City side, sections have gone in over several building seasons: the stretch from Justa Street along the Auburn levee toward LA 70, the segment threading past the Cajun Coast Visitor Center, and pieces that carry neighborhood names locals chose for themselves long before any of this had a parish-wide label. Identification signs went up in Sacred Heart Park, Marquis Manor, and Auburn on the Morgan City side, and in Golden Farms across the river in Berwick, paid for in part by residents who raised the money themselves.
Morgan City's chief administrative officer, Charlie Solar, described where the completed network is headed once the remaining funding is in place: it will wrap around the entire city with a few little fingers going through the middle to access key parts of the community.
The Money Behind the Fall Timeline
The reason 2026 became the finish line instead of some vaguer someday is a $16.9 million federal RAISE grant that funds more than half of Morgan City's planned trail network. Solar has said the award covers roughly 60 percent of the project, leaving something like 15 to 20 percent still to be raised, with people already working on that piece. The grant traces back to a project map that the citizens' group St. Mary Excel paid engineering firm T. Baker Smith to draft, detailed enough that Excel president Catherine Holcomb could point to exactly what it plots along the route: the towers, Lake Palourde, the hospital.
None of that groundwork happens without the H&B Young Foundation, which has quietly funded pieces of Morgan City's trail system for years, including a $90,000 donation toward the levee-side BIKE MORGAN CITY segment and a $102,000 gift that helped close out the Justa-to-Cajun-Coast phase built by Cedar Construction.
One Name for Every Trail
This past July, Berwick's town council adopted a resolution naming Morgan City and Berwick as founding partners in something called the Atchafalaya Gateway Trail, with the Long-Allen Bridge positioned as its centerpiece. Morgan City's council followed within weeks. The idea traces back to a 2018 Urban Land Institute Advisory Service Panel study, commissioned by St. Mary Excel, that first made the case for linking the two towns' separate trail efforts under a shared identity. The resolution is careful to note the new name doesn't replace Berwick's trail or Morgan City's, it just gives them, and any other St. Mary Parish community that wants in, a common story and a stronger hand when applying for the next round of grant funding. Berwick's resolution names Patterson, Baldwin, Amelia, Bayou Vista, Charenton, Centerville, and Siracusaville as invited partners. Amelia already has a mostly finished trail of its own, and the Bayou Teche National Wildlife Refuge maintains hiking and paddling routes near Franklin, Garden City, and Centerville that could eventually feed into the same network.
St. Mary Excel's executive director, Monica Mancuso, summed up the connective piece of it plainly when the resolution went public: the Morgan City Trail, the Berwick Trail, the Amelia Trail, pulling it all together.
What Changes This Fall
For someone who already lives here, the reopening isn't really about cars getting their bridge back. It's about what becomes possible on foot and on two wheels.
- A car-free crossing of the Atchafalaya connecting directly into Berwick's finished 4.2-mile trail, instead of routing across on Highway 90.
- A network that, once the remaining funding lands, wraps most of Morgan City's perimeter with connector paths reaching places residents already go, including the hospital and the Cajun Coast Visitor Center.
- Safer, marked routes for students at the South Louisiana Community College Morgan City campus, a point Cajun Coast Tourism's Carrie Stansbury raised when the RAISE grant was announced, alongside the hope that easier walking and biking access brings visiting families back for another trip.
- One shared parish identity that doesn't erase the Berwick Trail or the Morgan City trail names locals already use, just adds a thread tying them together.
None of this required officials to guess what Morgan City wanted. The town told the state exactly that, one Saturday a month, on a bridge that wasn't even open to cars at the time. The grant money and the resolutions simply caught up to what residents had already shown.
I live and work in this stretch of St. Mary Parish, and updates like this are exactly why I love representing it. If you want to talk through what a particular block or neighborhood is actually like to live in day to day, whether that's near one of these new trail segments or somewhere else in Morgan City, Berwick, or the surrounding towns, schedule a free consultation with Lori Broussard and we'll talk it through, no script, no pressure.
