CLEVELAND, Ohio - The 101-mile Towpath Trail notched another milestone Friday with the installation of a 130-foot-long, 14-foot-wide bike and pedestrian bridge over West 7th Street, north of Quigley Road in the Tremont neighborhood.

A construction crew from Mark Haynes Construction in Norwalk used a large crane to position the 40-ton, prefabricated steel truss bridge.

Another facet of the project, an overlook structure southeast of giant dirt mounds at the site, is to be installed Saturday, said Jim Ridge of Canalway Partners.

The bridge will create a seamless walk-and-bike connection over a city street that functions as a hillside on-ramp for heavy east- and west-bound truck traffic on I-490.

The new span is part of Stage 3 of the Towpath in Cleveland, one of four sections costing a total of $52 million, primarily in public dollars, and targeted for completion in December, 2020.

We've got ourselves a stage 3 #TowpathTrail bridge sighting on W. 7th! pic.twitter.com/UOy51OCm6x — Canalway Partners (@canalwaycle) August 17, 2018

The trail, which has been under construction for two decades, follows the general path of the 1832 Ohio & Erie Canal for much of its length. In Cleveland, it has helped spur redevelopment in the Tremont neighborhood south of downtown, and along trails winding up adjacent tributary valleys.

Stage 3, which is scheduled for completion in the spring of 2019, will connect the Steelyard Commons shopping center to Literary Road in Tremont. It skirts the west edge of Clark Fields Park, where the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency started to remediate contaminated soil last year.

Construction of I-71 and I-490 in the 1960s severed sections of Tremont from one another, with I-71 running north-south through the neighborhood and I-490 running east-west across it and the industrial Flats. The Towpath Trail is part of an effort to reconnect what was cut apart.

"It's healing [the valley] in a sense,'' said landscape architect Jeff Kerr of Cleveland- and Akron-based Environmental Design Group, which is designed Stage 3 along with the Cleveland office of Michael Baker International. "It's interweaving the industrial valley and connecting different parts of the community."