Burns Park Bridge

Burns Park Bridge crosses a fork of White Oak Bayou inside Burns Park, one of the largest municipal parks in the country, on the north side of North Little Rock. Built in 1972, the red-painted 85-foot stringer bridge is the second-longest covered span documented in Arkansas, a state that never developed the 19th-century timber-truss covered bridge tradition found across the Northeast and Midwest.

Arkansas's only real historic covered bridge, the 1846 Town lattice-truss Washita Bridge at Rockport, washed away in a flood the year after it was built, and the state has had no genuine historic example since. What survives today instead is a scattered handful of small modern stringer bridges built by private landowners, park departments, and businesses across the state — decorative rooflines over simple beam spans rather than engineered trusses. Burns Park Bridge stands out among them for its public setting and size, and for weathering a March 2023 tornado that tore through North Little Rock and caused significant damage across the park, leaving the bridge itself intact.