I come from the head of the Mississippi River, where it is swift and runs through gorges, and we have many bridges. Minneapolis has 27 bridges over the Mississippi; St. Paul has 11. (Three of those have one end in each of the two cities and are counted twice.) At the other end of the river, where it is slower and wider, New Orleans has only one bridge: the Crescent City Connection.

There's another difference between the two cities in January, which is when I visited the Big Easy in 2017: there the Mississippi is still liquid. During that time of year it's frozen over here and we ship all of our humidity downriver, as you can see from the morning fog in this photo.

My priority for photographing a bridge is always getting beneath it, and that's not an easy thing to do in New Orleans unless you're there for a cruise. Because there's no gorge to support the crossing, there's a long, rising approach to the bridge on the city side, and you can get under it, but there's no view of the bridge. They built a convention center in the way. And while it's only a little out of the way for pedestrian traffic to get to the entrance of the convention center, the bridge is on the other side. So I had to walk all the way around, dodging car traffic meant for the cruise ship terminal which is also behind the convention center, past Mardi Gras World and a Tulane University research center, to get to the bridge.

It was worth it, though; there's a nice little park behind the Port Authority building with good access to the area beneath the bridge, and a very pretty riverboat moored there. As so often seems to be the case, the first time I found it I didn't have the lens I really needed for the location, so I had to come back the next morning, and do the whole walk-round again. But I'm glad I did; I ended up with my favorite architectural photograph of 2017, and one that's in the running for the best I've ever taken.

I love the idealized vivid color of the reflections from the windows of the Port Authority and the way they transition smoothly into the grittier universe of the unreflected bridge.

This has been an entry in the 1001 Places to Remember project by @archisteem in collaboration with Architecture and City by @photocircle.