Sean Penn Helped Build Duluth’s Lift Bridge?

The 1929–1930 crew of the Kansas City Bridge Company, which converted Duluth’s Aerial Bridge from a transfer bridge to a lift bridge. (Image: Duluth Public Library)

We know this story is a myth because we made it up ourselves. We published the photograph above in Crossing the Canal, our history of the Duluth Aerial Bridge. We looked a little closer at this one and, as any history-curious person might, asked ourselves a silly question, “Is the photo evidence that Academy Award© Winning actor Sean Penn time traveled to the Zenith City in 1929 to work the Duluth Aerial Bridge?”

The subject of the photograph is a crew of workers with the Kansas City Bridge Company, posing on the bridge’s brand new road deck in the winter of 1930. From August 1929 until March 1930 these men converted the structure from a transfer bridge to a lift bridge. Please note the gentleman sitting cross-legged at the center of the photograph, smoking a cigarette. He sure looks an awful lot like Madonna’s first husband to us.

Was Sean Penn’s doppelgänger in Duluth in 1930? Or was it Penn himself, transporting through time to…work on a bridge…?

Penn is apparently not the only Hollywood notable with the ability to break the rules of physics. In May 2013 a variety of news outlets reported that rapper Jay-Z somehow time traveled to 1933 Harlem to sit on stoop—at least that’s what a vintage photograph seems to indicate.

Similar claims have been made about other celebrities, most notably Nicholas Cage. In 2011 an 1870 photograph of a Tennessee man who looks remarkably like Cage went up for sale on eBay for $1 million dollars; the seller claimed it was evidence that Cage is a vampire. But that’s silly. Everyone knows you can’t photograph a vampire.

Though we doubt Mr. Penn has the technology to visit the past, the 1930 photo begs the question, if you could time travel, why go back to work on a bridge, in Duluth, in the winter, just after the start of the Great Depression? Aren’t there better ways to spend your time while spending it in another time?

Thanks for allowing us to have some fun; visit our history archive for some less silly history.