The Joy of the Unexpected Bridge
I was thinking about some unexpected traffic bridges around town that’re only known about by neighborhood denizens; traditional printed maps never showed them (and it would’ve been easy). In most cases, these “unexpected” bridges came about due to drastic topography or rivulets and streams that come to the surface, getting away from the sewers where they usually reside.
Upper Manhattan is occasionally hilly in extreme. One such hill was known as Coogan’s Bluff in the past, bordering the Harlem River. 155th St. is bridged over the Harlem River by Macomb’s Dam Bridge. The street itself is bridged over the bluff directly from the Macombs Dam Bridge to Maher Square at Edgecombe Ave. at the south end of High Bridge Park on a viaduct that runs high over Frederick Douglass Boulevard (8th Ave.). The department of Transportation has painted it the same pale yellow color sported by the MDB. More photos of this viaduct available on Forgotten New York.
Staying with W. 155th, over the years I’ve become familiar with the W. 155th St. Riverside Dr. viaduct; to the immediate the left is the main entrance to Uptown Trinity Cemetery, as its own designers failed to place the entrance on Broadway, the most logical spot. Just inside the entrance is the gravesite of Clement Clark Moore, the composer of “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” This is something of an Underpass to Nowhere, since at the other end is a somewhat rickety pedestrian bridge spanning railroad tracks.
This is the highest and plainest of the Riverside Dr. viaducts on this page, though the highest is the lengthy one that takes the Drive high above 12th Ave. from W. 125th to W. 138th Sts. This one is tall enough to fit a garage under it.
In the southern Bronx, 161st Street presents two faces: the broad boulevard running east from Jerome Ave. at Yankee Stadium east to O’Neill Triangle at Elton Ave.; east of there, it’s just another numbered east-west side street. East of 3rd Ave., though, the terrain gets hilly and rather than have 161st St. climb up a steep hill to meet Eagle Ave., traffic engineers kept 161st St. level and bridge Eagle Ave. over it.
When the Eagle Ave. Bridge was built in 1936 designers including infrastructure like decorative railings and lampposts, which are still in place here, though cobra neck lamp masts replaced the lamps that had been here until the 1960s. Views of (not so picturesque) 161st St. can be seen from the bridge.
While bumbling about the West Farms area a few years ago I was surprised to happen upon this trestle bridge taking E. 174th above the Bronx River at Starlight Park. I knew there had to be a bridge, but was surprised to see all this glorious metalwork. Blue-painted bridges are a feature in the Bronx, though blue’s also used in other boroughs.
Another viaduct is employed to take 241st St. above Bronx Blvd., the Metro-North commuter railroad and the Bronx River into Yonkers, where it’s called Wakefield Ave., named for the neighborhood inside the Bronx line. Just north of here, the Bronx-Yonkers line undergoes twists and turns, and follows the old path of the Bronx River before engineers straightened it several decades ago.
I get a picture of this gem every time I’m in Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace. Here, Prospect Ave. runs through a deep valley and, similar to Eagle Ave., rather than have Seeley St. descend and ascend a steep hill, long-ago developers chose to bridge it. However, the arch is low, at 9’7″ and I’m not sure all trucks can get under it.
—Kevin Walsh is the webmaster of the award-winning website Forgotten NY, and the author of the books Forgotten New York (HarperCollins, 2006) and also, with the Greater Astoria Historical Society, Forgotten Queens (Arcadia, 2013)