In the 1960's, London Bridge was moved from London to which place in Arizona?

By the 1960s, the historic London Bridge, built in the 1830s, was sinking into the River Thames, unable to support the weight of modern traffic. The City of London decided to sell the aging structure and build a new one. The winning bid came from Robert P. McCulloch, an American oil tycoon and entrepreneur who was founding a new, planned community in the Arizona desert. He purchased the bridge for $2.46 million as a bold marketing gimmick to attract residents and tourists to his development.

The move was a monumental feat of engineering. The bridge was carefully dismantled, with each of its 10,276 exterior granite blocks meticulously numbered. The stones were shipped over 10,000 miles through the Panama Canal to California and then trucked inland to their new home. Reassembly began in 1968, but the original blocks were used as a facade, cladding a new, hollow-core concrete structure capable of handling modern vehicles.

Perhaps most remarkably, the bridge was reconstructed on a dry patch of land connecting a peninsula to the mainland. Once the bridge was complete, the Bridgewater Channel was dredged out from underneath it, creating an island and turning a desert landscape into a unique waterfront attraction. The bridge officially opened in Lake Havasu City in 1971 and remains one of Arizona’s most popular tourist destinations.