Gregory said she would look forward to seeing the bridge as she drove up Merritt Boulevard, headed toward Holabird and Wise avenues. The sight has “been imprinted in my brain,” Gregory said. She still hasn’t gone to see what remains of the bridge. It’s too painful.

Construction started on the bridge in 1972 to relieve congestion from the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel. In the years leading up to its opening in 1977, Ben Womer, a retired steelworker and the founder of the Dundalk-Patapsco Neck Historical Society, lobbied state officials to have the bridge named after Francis Scott Key, who historians believe watched the bombing of Fort McHenry within 100 yards of the structure’s footprint. The battle inspired Key to write the poem that later became the national anthem.

“He was told by former Gov. Harry R. Hughes, then secretary of the Maryland Department of Transportation, that the bridge would be so named and to please stop writing him letters on the subject,” read Womer’s 1994 obituary in The Baltimore Sun.

Gloria Nelson and Bobby DeWeese both remember watching the Key Bridge go up – Nelson from Turner Station and DeWeese from Greektown, where he grew up. On Wednesday, they recalled their shock upon hearing the news of its collapse.

DeWeese, a safe technician and locksmith, shed tears. He’s lived in Dundalk since 1995 and is used to taking the bridge a few times a week. Even when it would be faster to take the Harbor or Fort McHenry tunnels, he’d choose to drive over the bridge instead. It made him feel close to God, he wrote on Facebook. To his right, he’d see the town where he grew up. To his left, he’d see the steel mill where his mother once worked and Sparrows Point, where his father was a police officer.

The loss of the bridge might make driving to Annapolis and Southern Maryland for jobs more inconvenient in the future, but for DeWeese, 64, the emotions hit harder than the logistics.

“It’s weird,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Why does a grown man cry over a bridge?’ That bridge just meant so much to me.”

There’s an “unbelievable emptiness” in the sky without the bridge, said Nelson, 73, president of Turner Station Conservation Teams. She grew up in Turner Station, where she and her friends went crabbing on a platform in Fleming Park that once held materials for the bridge’s construction. Early Tuesday morning, she was awoken by phone calls about the structure’s collapse. The following hours were stabbed with fear as she wondered how many people had been on the bridge and how many were hurt.

The next day, she and other community members brought coffee and donuts down to the first responders working at the site.

“It was a quick reminder that life is precious,” she said of the collapse. “We need to be mindful of that.”

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