Manhattan Bridge (1944) - Pieces Falling Off / No Way to Tear It Down! / Not Dead

            One of the 3 bridges spanning the lower East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Carries 4 subway tracks and vehicle traffic. Before the Verrazano Narrows bridge opened this was the main route to New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Washington DC by way of Canal Street and the Holland Tunnel. Gridlocked traffic and horrible pollution were the norm.

But the main problem was the arrangement of the train tracks - they were outboard on both sides of the bridge. Often 4 trains were on the bridge at the same time traveling in opposite directions causing a torsion wave to twist the bridge. Until the connections were modified in 1967, the north side had much heavier traffic than the south side, causing a permanent distortion. By the 1980s pieces were failing off and a full inspection indicated that the bridge needed to be torn down and replaced. However no one could figure out how to tear it down safely. Therefore a long (and expensive) repair program was started with different parts of the bridge closed in turn for years at a time. It is now complete and the bridge is no longer in imminent danger of collapse.

In the 1960s, my father would routinely send me to the "less affluent" area under the bridge for a "25 cent" haircut. He was always surprised when I came back alive and cheerful.

Taken on: July 17, 2016

Tags:

New

York

vintage

post

card

midtown

south

Manhattan

Bridge

subway

tracks

damage « less

Sets appears in: • High Points of Manhattan, New York

Stats: 568 views

close tools panel

Badge creator

Use Flickriver Badge Creator to create a badge linking to your photos, your group or any other Flickriver view.

You can place your badge on your Flickr profile, Blog or Website.

Add to your iGoogle or Netvibes page

Flickriver widget for iGoogle or Netvibes can display almost any Flickriver view - most interesting today, by user, by group, by tag etc. Once added to your personalized homepage, just edit widget settings to select your desired view.

Clickr on one of the buttons below to install:

Embed on your Web site

To embed this view, Copy and Paste the following HTML code:

Black background (preview):

White background (preview):

Firefox and Chrome addons

Adds a 'Flickriver' button to your browser. While viewing any Flickr photos page, click on this button to open the same view on Flickriver.

Install in Firefox
Install in Chrome

Search plugin

Add 'Search on Flickriver' to your browser's search box. Works with Firefox and Internet Explorer. Install search plugin

"View on Flickriver" Greasemonkey script

A Greasemonkey script that adds Flickriver links to various Flickr photo pages - user photos, favorites, pools etc, allowing to quickly open the corresponding Flickriver view.

Also, allows quickly viewing any Flickr photo on black background in large size.

Install "View on Flickriver" script

Bookmarklet

While viewing any Flickr photos page, click on the bookmarklet to open the same view on Flickriver.

To install: drag and drop the following link to your Bookmarks toolbar.
IE users - add the link to your Favorites under the Links folder