Newport, Kentucky: Purple People Bridge

The Purple People Bridge hosts themed nights on Wednesdays and food trucks through the summer weeks, with music. "Party on the Purple."

The Purple People Bridge was in the movie "The Mighty" with Sharon Stone. The main character, Max, walks across the bridge every day in the morning and then again, late at night.

There are a bunch of padlocks on the bridge, where married couples have written their names down on the back and thrown the keys into the Ohio River. Regardless of if you can walk on the top or not, it's still a nice walk if you're ever in Cincinnati!

Just thought you'd want to know that the Purple People Bridge Climb ($60, later reduced to $40) has closed, at least for now. You can still walk across the bridge and the bridge is still purple, but the only bridge climb in the Northern Hemisphere is closed.

The city of Cincinnati temporarily solved one of Speigel's Purple People Bridge problems by providing something to look at. During the Tallstacks celebration, the Ohio River was lined with riverboats and the bridge was lined with climbers. On the festival's last day, I don't think the bridge was ever entirely devoid of purple suits and, at at least one point, there were clusters of them atop four of the bridges arches. The price was down to thirty bucks, perhaps permanently. I'm guessing that attendance is back to normal now that the big boats have left town.

It sounded like a great idea to politicians and boosters of Cincinnati, Ohio, and Newport, Kentucky: lease an abandoned bridge over the Ohio River to a promoter who would then paint it a garish color and convince people to pay $60 a piece to walk across it. The promoter said that 80,000 people a year would pay for the experience, pumping about $30 million a year into the local economy.