London Bridge

Lake Havasu City, Arizona

Some historians think that the American Empire peaked in 1969, when NASA put a man on the moon. But if we were to make our own self-kicking machine pronouncement, we'd say that the peak happened a year earlier, when the cash-strapped City of London sold its famous London Bridge to an American oilman.

Robert P. McCulloch, who also manufactured chainsaws, paid $2.5 million for the bridge. He then paid another $7.5 million to have it pulled apart, crated, shipped to the U.S., and reassembled as the centerpiece of a city that he was building in the Arizona desert. As a final gesture, McCulloch had the bridge declared an antique to avoid paying taxes on it.

(America has a number of replicas of Old World wonders, some quite impressive, but this is a rare instance in which we nabbed the real thing.)

The bridge is 950 feet long and weighs 33,000 tons. It's sometimes confused with the more visually interesting Tower Bridge (which remains in London) and sometimes mistakenly believed to date from the Middle Ages (it was built in 1831). The only thing that the bridge really has going for it is the "London Bridge" name, but that was enough for McCulloch. He had it rebuilt on dry land, then had a mile-long "river" dug underneath it, turning a Lake Havasu peninsula into an island and giving the bridge something to do.

Decades have passed since the bridge reopened on October 10, 1971, and the novelty of driving over London Bridge has passed for Lake Havasu City, if not for its tourists. A Merry-Olde-England mini-resort, built next to the bridge in the 1970s, was mostly bulldozed in 2016. But visitors can still buy a chip of the bridge, glued to a card, in one of the neighborhood gift shops; and a bronze statue of McCulloch stands on the bridge's eastern approach, a permanent reminder to tourists of how it got here.

Lake Havasu City, however, was built to be much more than a bridge. It has succeeded; with 60,000 inhabitants, it's the most lively metropolis within 150 miles. To a younger generation, London Bridge is not a symbol of American ascendency; it's just the quickest route between the Burger King and the Javelina Cantina.