Bridge Marks 70 Years

Vintage cars make their way across the Triborough Bridge as part of the birthday celebration. Photo Vinny DuPre Tuesday, July 11 marked the 70th anniversary of the opening of the Triborough Bridge connecting Manhattan, The Bronx and Queens. MTA Bridges and Tunnels, the city Department of Parks and Recreation, local officials, community leaders and children celebrated the 1936 joint opening of the bridge and Randall's Island Park, beginning with a parade of vintage cars from the foot of the bridge in Astoria Park at 10 a.m.

The bridge is the flagship facility of MTA Bridges and Tunnels and carries almost 200,000 vehicles a day. The opening of the major crossing connecting three boroughs and a major urban recreation area, Randall's Island Park and Downing Stadium, which was replaced recently by Icahn Track and Field Stadium, was national news. Completed during the Depression, it was one of the largest public works projects in the nation at the time, and the first crossing built by master builder Robert Moses, then chairman of the Triborough Bridge Authority, predecessor to MTA Bridges and Tunnels. The opening ceremonies on July 11, 1936 took place during a record-breaking heat wave and many used the bridge for the first time to go to Jones Beach and the other parks and parkways that had also been built by Moses as head of the Long Island State Park Commission. Others who didn't own cars took to the walkways of the new bridge. Since that time, 3.16 billion vehicles have crossed the bridge.

Photo courtesy MTA Bridges and Tunnels. Workers install cable on the newly constructed Triborough Bridge 70 years ago. The Triborough Bridge was the first major bridge in the city designed without a provision for rail. The four older East River bridges all carried rail and even horse-drawn traffic in their early years. The Triborough Bridge and the 14 miles of highway approaches that were built as part of its construction were at the heart of the city's emerging system of highways. In fact, the opening day brochure called the entire project "a modern metropolitan traffic artery."

The Triborough Bridge was originally to be a municipal project financed by New York City bonds or corporate stock and repaid by tolls. The groundbreaking occurred on Oct. 25, 1929, one day after "Black Thursday", the day the stock market crashed, heralding the Great Depression. It was to be in a style resembling the Manhattan Bridge with granite-covered piers and gothic arches on its steel towers. The towers and cables of the suspension span would have been massive enough for a future second deck that would have brought the number of traffic lanes to 16. Construction of the bridge continued sporadically for three years before funding dried up. By 1932, hulking anchorages and a handful of piers were all that stood of the project that the city could no longer afford to build. The project was brought back to life in 1932, and the state established the Triborough Bridge Authority on Apr. 7, 1933 to issue bonds, backed by tolls, and complete the bridge.

One of the first things Moses did as chairman was to "borrow" the Port of New York Authority's Chief Engineer, Othmar Hermann Amman, on a half-time schedule to redesign the bridge. Ammann, who had achieved international fame as chief engineer of the George Washington Bridge three years earlier, redesigned the Triborough Bridge as a single-deck structure in a streamlined, art deco style. Eliminating the second deck and stonework reduced the cost and freed up funds to pay for the bridge approaches, which were not accounted for in the original plan.

The Triborough Bridge was one of the most complex public works projects of the Depression era. It includes a suspension span to Queens, a lift span to Manhattan and a truss span to The Bronx. A huge traffic junction was constructed on Randall's Island where traffic from the three spans would meet, moving in 12 directions but never intersecting. On an average day, 1,000 men worked on the construction site, a number that increased to 2,800 during the weeks before it opened. Across the nation, thousands more went back to work to supply materials in steel mills, fabricating shops, lumber mills and concrete plants that had been closed by the Depression. The bridge cost $60.3 million to build.

The success of the bridge provided the framework for the agency that is now MTABridges and Tunnels. In addition to the Triborough Bridge, the agency built the Henry Hudson, Marine ParkwayGil Hodges, Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Cross Bay-Veterans Memorial and VerrazanoNarrows bridges and the Queens Midtown and Brooklyn-Battery tunnels. In 1968 New York state created the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to unify policy and control for regional transportation, and Robert Moses resigned as TBTA chairman. Since that time, almost $14 billion from the MTA Bridges and Tunnels has helped support operations and capital improvement projects for MTA agencies, including New York City Transit, Metro North, the Long Island Rail Road and Long Island Bus.

The motorcade of vintage cars from Astoria Park traced the route of the opening day and then proceeded to Icahn Stadium on Randall's Island for an anniversary ceremony for the bridge and the park and a children's "fun run" commemorating Jesse Owens' historic triumph in the Olympic trials at that site, where Downing Stadium once stood. Also in celebration of the anniversary of the bridge, the New York Transit Museum, in collaboration with MTA Bridges and Tunnels, has mounted an exhibit entitled "The Triborough Bridge: Robert Moses and the Automobile Age". Featuring models, photographs and drawings from the MTA Bridges and Tunnels Special Archive, the exhibit tells the story of the first bridge built by Moses in New York City and how it became an important factor in the regional highway system and later a major source of support to public transit through the MTA. It also shows how the bridge was built and provides a glimpse of the city just before it was transformed by the automobile. The Transit Museum is located at Boerum Place and Schermerhorn Street in Brooklyn Heights.