By the 1960s, John Rennie's 1831 London Bridge was sinking into the Thames under the weight of modern traffic. The Common Council of the City of London decided to sell the historic structure rather than demolish it. Entrepreneur Robert P.
McCulloch, founder of Lake Havasu City, bought the bridge for $2. 46 million as an audacious marketing stunt to draw homebuyers to his remote desert development. Moving a 130,000-ton stone monument across the Atlantic was a monumental civil engineering endeavor.
Engineers carefully surveyed the bridge and numbered every external granite block with white spray paint to document its exact location. The bridge was then carefully dismantled stone by stone. Rather than shipping the heavy interior rubble structure, only the facing stones were transported.
The blocks were shipped through the Panama Canal to Long Beach, California, and hauled by trucks to Lake Havasu City. To support the historic stones, engineers built a hollow reinforced concrete frame on dry land, anchored to an island in the lake. The granite blocks were then assembled like a massive three-dimensional puzzle over the concrete core.
Once the reassembly was complete, a canal was dredged under the bridge to create an island and allow water to flow beneath it. Opened in 1971, Lake Havasu's London Bridge remains one of Arizona's most popular tourist attractions and a triumph of absurd historical relocation.