If Congress had gotten its way, there would be an eight-lane freeway bridge sitting on top of the Three Sisters, three small rocky islands just upriver from Key Bridge. Work actually started in 1969. Students and neighbors fought it on the streets and out on the river, and a team of lawyers finally stopped it in court.
Long-time DC residents may remember the fight. Most people crossing Key Bridge today have no idea it happened, or that a freeway was supposed to run up Canal Road to meet it.
An Old Idea
A bridge here wasn’t a new idea. Pierre L’Enfant floated a crossing at this spot in 1791, and planners kept coming back to it. In 1957, South Dakota Senator Francis Case introduced a bill for a bridge at Three Sisters. Nothing came of that one, but the 1959 Mass Transportation Survey put a Three Sisters bridge into its plan for a ring of highways around Washington.
Here’s how the Washington Post reported it on April 30th, 1959. The “he” quoted below is Harold Aitken, the District’s highway director.
District and Virginia highway officials have agreed tentatively that the next upstream bridge across the Potomac should be built at Three Sisters Islands.
…
The bridge would connect the Potomac Freeway, the Glover-Archbold Parkway and the Palisades Parkway on the District side of the river with George Washington Memorial Parkway and possibly with Interstate Route 66 on the Virginia Side. Of these, only the Washington Parkway in Virginia is now being built.
The location is one of three considered by highway and planning bodies in recent years. The others are at the foot of Arizona ave. nw. and at the foot of Nebraska ave. nw., both farther upstream.
…
One advantage of the Three Sisters location, he declared, is its truck-carrying potential. No trucks will be permitted on the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge at Constitution ave. nw., he pointed out. The Roosevelt crossing will handle auto traffic off the interstate highway.
By 1960 the District’s freeway plans had the crossing built in. The Whitehurst Freeway would be extended up Canal Road as the Potomac River Freeway. A spur off it would cross the river at Three Sisters to the George Washington Parkway and the planned I-66. Remember, these were the days when whole cities were being reshaped for the car.
That same year, Congress put on a brake. The National Capital Transportation Act of 1960 set up planning for a rail transit system. It also froze new freeways west of 12th Street NW until July 1st, 1965. The bridge kept moving on paper, but the roads it was supposed to feed were on hold.
On August 6th, 1961, the Post ran it on the front page: “New Bridge Slated for Early Start.” The bridge and freeway were supposed to be finished by 1966 at a total cost of $28.5 million. The bridge would have eight lanes, more than any other Potomac crossing, and it would carry the trucks that were banned from the new Roosevelt Bridge.
Neighborhood groups in Georgetown, Foxhall and the Palisades weren’t thrilled, and they fought it for years.
Congress Forces the Issue
The freeze ran out in 1965, and the bridge was back on the table. In December 1966, the D.C. Federation of Civic Associations and other groups sued to stop the bridge. Their lawyers were Roberts B. Owen and Gerald P. Norton of Covington & Burling.
The new U.S. Department of Transportation opened on April 1st, 1967, and Secretary Alan Boyd was skeptical. In May 1967 he said he wanted the project studied again, including whether it should be built at all.
Below are some design proposals printed in the Washington Post on September 21st, 1967. The last one is horrendous.
That same year, President Lyndon Johnson reorganized the city’s government. His Reorganization Plan No. 3 replaced the three-member Board of Commissioners with a single appointed Commissioner and a nine-member appointed City Council. The Commissioner was Walter Washington, and everyone called him the mayor, though the title didn’t become official until home rule in 1975.
The new Council opposed the bridge. That set the city against two powerful congressmen, Rep. William Natcher of Kentucky and Rep. John Kluczynski of Illinois, both Democrats.
Natcher chaired the House Appropriations subcommittee for the District, which meant he controlled the city’s money, including its share of the new subway. Natcher didn’t hide what he wanted. He said he couldn’t recommend “money for a rapid transit system if the freeway system in our city is halted.”
Kluczynski chaired the House roads subcommittee, and he went further. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1968 had a section, Section 23, ordering the District to start work on the bridge within 30 days. The order stood “notwithstanding any other provision of law, or any court decision or administrative action to the contrary.” In other words, build it no matter what a judge says. Johnson signed it on August 23rd, 1968.
The 30-day deadline came and went. In December 1968, the National Capital Planning Commission adopted a highway plan without the bridge. Then on January 17th, 1969, three days before Johnson left office, the Federal Highway Administration took the bridge out of the Interstate system. It looked like the final nail in the coffin.
1969: The Bridge Comes Back
Richard Nixon took office, and Natcher made good on his threat, freezing the subway money until the city gave in. On August 9th, 1969, the appointed City Council voted 6 to 2 to comply with the 1968 Highway Act, a vote everyone read as approving the bridge.
It was ugly. The next morning’s Washington Post headline read “Fists Fly at Voting on Roads.” Chairs were overturned, someone threw an ashtray at Council Chairman Gilbert Hahn Jr., and 14 protesters were arrested. An ashtray, over a highway vote. After it was over, President Nixon called Hahn to thank the Council.
Four days later, Nixon’s Transportation Secretary, John Volpe, signed off, and the bridge went back into the Interstate plan. Natcher released the subway money in late September, and construction on the bridge began that October. Metro, the new subway, broke ground on December 9th, 1969.
Meanwhile, the protests moved to the river. On October 10th, students from Georgetown, George Washington and American universities paddled canoes and rowboats out to the Three Sisters, unfurled a STOP THE BRIDGE sign and camped out overnight. Within a couple of days about 100 protesters of all ages were out on the islands.
On October 15th, hundreds more showed up at the construction site shouting “Stop the bridge, free D.C.” and “Power to the people.” Police arrested 141 of them, mostly students.
One of the student leaders was Matt Andrea of the Student Committee on the Transportation Crisis. On October 26th, the Post quoted him tying the “immoral war in Vietnam” to what he called the “war here against the poor of the inner city.” He meant the whole freeway plan, which he said threatened to displace 25,000 people in the inner city.
Then, in the early morning of Sunday, November 2nd, someone firebombed the contractor’s trailers. Here’s how the Post reported it the next day:
Two construction trailers at the site of the controversial Three Sisters Bridge were destroyed by fire yesterday.
Police said the trailers and their contents, owned by the Head Construction Co., were valued at $14,000.
They said the fires, which broke out shortly after 5:30 a.m., apparently were started by “fire bombs.”
Two days later, on November 4th, opponents set up their own unofficial ballot boxes outside the polls during the school board election. The count was 9,850 against the bridge and its freeways and 1,819 for it. That’s about 84 percent against.
The Courts Step In
The protests didn’t stop the work. The lawsuit the civic associations filed back in 1966 did, though it took a while. By now the case was called D.C. Federation of Civic Associations v. Volpe.
On August 3rd, 1970, federal Judge John Sirica ruled that the bridge couldn’t go forward until the city held a new hearing on its design. The design had changed a lot since the last public hearing back in 1964. He rejected the argument that Natcher’s pressure made Volpe’s approval illegal. Work stopped on August 27th, 1970, with two pier holes drilled into the riverbed and a steel frame standing in the water.
With the bridge stalled, Natcher started holding back Metro money again. In October 1970, Volpe stepped around him with a $57 million emergency loan to keep subway construction going.
Fourteen months later, on October 12th, 1971, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled 2 to 1 that Volpe hadn’t properly followed federal law when he approved the bridge. The court said he may not have weighed every alternative, including no bridge at all. Unlike Sirica, the appeals court also said the approval would be invalid if it was based “in whole or in part on the pressures emanating from Representative Natcher.”
On December 2nd, 1971, the full House finally went around Natcher, voting 196 to 183 to release $72 million for Metro. The House leaders of both parties had stood behind Natcher, so that was a rare defeat for them. It was also a win for President Nixon, who had pushed for the subway money. The same day, the appeals court refused to rehear the bridge case.
Nixon had the Justice Department take the bridge case to the Supreme Court in January 1972. On March 27th, 1972, the Court declined to hear it, leaving the appeals court ruling in place.
Mother Nature took care of the rest. When Hurricane Agnes flooded the Potomac in June 1972, the steel frame on the D.C. side was snagged by driftwood and swept downstream, and the pier holes filled with rock and silt. The construction contract was canceled that August.
The official end came years later. On April 29th, 1977, federal officials approved the city’s request to withdraw the bridge and its freeways from the Interstate system and move the money to Metro. Mayor Washington announced it that May. Congress never formally repealed the order to build it.
What Happened to Natcher and Kluczynski
Natcher stayed in Congress until he died on March 29th, 1994, at 84, after nearly 41 years in the House. Brett Guthrie has represented his old Kentucky district since 2009.
Kluczynski represented Chicago for 24 years until he died on January 26th, 1975, at 78. Illinois’s 5th District is now held by Mike Quigley, who took over in 2009 from Rahm Emanuel.
The city would look very different with a freeway bridge looming over the Potomac north of Key Bridge. Instead, the Three Sisters are still just three rocks in the river, with a drowning legend of their own.
Here’s that rendering of the bridge again, side by side with a version we colorized using AI. Those three little rocks in the river are the Three Sisters islands the bridge was named for.
There’s a great book by Zachary Schrag called The Great Society Subway, about the history of Washington’s Metro, that covers a lot of this story. I highly recommend it. There are also some great images by DDOT on Flickr showing what the bridge might have looked like.
The Three Sisters Bridge wasn’t the only ambitious DC project to die on the drawing board. See also the 1960s plan to tunnel E Street and pave Pennsylvania Avenue in brick, and, for a highway from the same era that did get built, the Capital Beltway.
Thanks to Carl, who clerked for the D.C. Council’s transportation committee during this fight, for some corrections. In October 2026 I rechecked this post against the court rulings, the Federal Highway Administration’s history of the freeway fight and the original newspaper stories, and fixed several dates and figures.
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