Stand on the Bay Pier at Fort De Soto and look east, and the shape that dominates the sky over the channel is not the old fort's guns but a bridge: two pale towers trailing a fan of bright yellow cables, vaulting the mouth of Tampa Bay. The Sunshine Skyway crosses the same deep water the fort was built to guard, and its story, like the fort's, is one of disaster and rebuilding.
Before there was a bridge, crossing the lower bay meant a fifty-mile drive around through Tampa, or a ferry. The first Sunshine Skyway, a two-lane steel cantilever bridge, opened in 1954 and closed that gap, carrying traffic high over the shipping channel for the first time. Traffic grew, and in 1971 a second, parallel span was added alongside the first, making the crossing four lanes. For a quarter century the twin spans carried millions of drivers over one of the busiest shipping lanes on the Gulf.
On the morning of the 9th of May, 1980, a blinding squall swallowed the bay, and the outbound freighter Summit Venture lost its bearings near the channel and struck a support pier of the southbound span. More than twelve hundred feet of bridge fell into the water, taking cars, a truck, and a Greyhound bus with it; thirty-five people died. It was the second catastrophe in these waters in a single year, the Coast Guard cutter Blackthorn had sunk near the same bridge that January, and it made plain that the old span sat too close to a turn the great ships could not always make.
Florida's governor, Bob Graham, ordered a replacement designed so that no ship strike could ever drop it. The new Sunshine Skyway, designed by the engineers Figg and Muller and built between 1982 and 1987, was a different kind of structure entirely: a cable-stayed concrete bridge whose roadway hangs from a single fan of cables off each of two towers. It was set east of the old footprint, to give inbound ships more room to make their turn, and its piers were ringed with massive concrete fenders, called dolphins, built to stop a vessel even larger than the Summit Venture. When it opened in 1987 its main span reached twelve hundred feet between towers some four hundred and thirty feet tall, and it was the longest cable-stayed concrete bridge in the world. Its cables were painted a bright Sunshine-State yellow, and the span quickly became one of the most photographed bridges in America. In 2005 it was renamed the Bob Graham Sunshine Skyway Bridge for the governor who had willed it into being.
The ruined and surviving spans of the 1954 and 1971 bridges were demolished in the early 1990s, but they were not entirely lost. Their approaches were saved and converted into the Skyway Fishing Pier State Park, opened in 1994, said to be the longest fishing pier in the world, and much of the salvaged rubble was sunk nearby as artificial reef. From the new bridge's deck, or from the piers below, a visitor looks down on the channel where the phosphate ships still pass, where the Blackthorn went down, and across to the low green line of Mullet Key, with the old fort at its tip. The Skyway is the modern gate of the bay, standing watch over the same water the fort once did.