I was shocked and dismayed to learn that "Hendrix Bridge" has now become an actual official name of this railway structure crossing the river Sava. I hoped it was just someone pranking the Google Maps, but ostensibly it's here to stay - officially - since 2017.
Some pretend that the name is a dedication to Jimi Hendrix, the legend of avantgarde psychedelic rock of the 1960s and the grandfather of heavy metal. But poor Jimi probably had never even heard of Zagreb, let alone do anything for Zagreb that would warrant naming a significant piece of public property in the city after him. No. The bridge was named after a prominent graffiti tag that kept reappearing on it, that read "Hendrix". That's it. No "Jimi", just "Hendrix" - and that's the crux of the story. Had the graffiti read "Purple Haze", the bridge too would now be called that, I guess, even though it's green and clearly visible.
One can't escape the absurdity in the fact that a critically important part of the infrastructure is now officially named after a graffiti - by the same officials that maintain a zero-tolerance policy towards graffiti in their municipality and spend significant resources to remove them from public property. Even the original "Hendrix" tag itself had eventually met that fate and if you're a fresh visitor you will not see it because it's been long gone, due to that policy. A new rendition may occasionally appear, but it too will be promptly removed.
It's also a tragic affair, in a sense, because we've got too few bridges in Zagreb in general, and especially too few to spare on stupid names like that - while there's a long list of distinguished deceased citizens of our own, waiting for anything to be named after them.
To me, the whole stunt reeks of desperation, on the part of some influential but misguided people, to make Zagreb appear more "urbane" and more "Western" than it really needs to be. But the provincial complex and pretending to be something we're not has always been the mentality of Zagabrians. That's the reason why they keep electing that very sort of people to the position of Mayor.
Other than that, the bridge is a solid, if a bit old, piece of construction. It predates the WWII (and Jimi Hendrix's birth, for that matter). It's colored emerald green, which is why reasonable people call it "The Green Bridge". And it's the only bridge in the area serving the railway routes to the coast. If, God forbid, something ever happened to it, half of the Croatian railway system would've suddenly been rendered useless. That's because there's more metal in Jimi Hendrix's music than in our railway infrastructure; and because those in power know it's cheaper to invest into cheesy, crowd-pleasing stunts, than into something people...
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