City of Bridges

by Conroy


New York, perhaps the world's greatest city, is renowned for many things. The largest city in the United States, and one of the largest in the world, it's a center of world culture, commerce, finance, education, entertainment, and international affairs. The city is densely sprawled over five boroughs situated on three islands - Manhattan, Long Island (Brooklyn and Queens), Staten Island, and the mainland (the Bronx). Probably the first image that comes to your mind when thinking of New York is its famous skyline. The city, and especially Manhattan, is synonymous with that great American invention, the skyscraper. However, if you let your thoughts fall from all those celebrated buildings, and think about how the city's islands are linked (to each other and the mainland), perhaps you'll recall some of New York's other great engineering monuments - its many outstanding bridges. Indeed, for someone captivated by large bridges, such as myself, there can be no better city in the world to visit than New York, the city of bridges.

Last weekend a couple of friends and I drove to New York to watch the U.S. Open. Leaving New Jersey we crossed the Goethals Bridge to Staten Island, went across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge into Brooklyn, and past the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, and Williamsburg Bridge on the way to Queens. Each distinctive and impressive, but these exemplars are only a fraction of the total. All told there are 37 major road and rail (or combination) bridges in the city. They include all major forms:

• arch (Alexander Hamilton, High, Washington);
• bascule (Greenpoint Avenue, Pelham, Pulaski);
• beam (Rikers Island);
• cantilever (Goethals, Queensboro, Outerbridge);
• causeway (Cross Bay Veterans Memorial, Joseph P. Addabbo);
• steel arch (Bayonne, Hell Gate, Henry Hudson);
• suspension (Brooklyn, Bronx-Whitestone, George Washington, Manhattan, Robert F. Kennedy (formerly the Triborough), Throgs Neck, Verrazano-Narrows);
• swing (145th Street, City Island, Macombs Dam, Madison Avenue, Spuyten Duyvil, University Heights, Willis Avenue);
• truss (Kosciuszko, Third Avenue), and;
• vertical lift (Arthur Kill, Broadway, Marine Parkway, Park Avenue, Roosevelt Island).

The Historic
This long list includes the historic, the massive, and the beautiful. Let's start with the historic, and the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge spans the East River and connects lower Manhattan with northwest Brooklyn. It was designed by the famous bridge builder John Roebling and completed by his son Washington; construction spanned the years 1870 to 1883; it is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the country. At the time it was built it was the longest suspension bridge in the world. It represented a leap in engineering and is a forerunner of the great suspension bridges built in the twentieth century. Its combination of engineering innovation, impressive size (especially for the time), and distinctive architecture have made it a New York icon and one of the most recognizable bridges in the world.

Build it Tall

by Conroy

The iconic spire of the Chrysler Building

When I was a little kid I was awed by tall buildings. I thought skyscrapers were the coolest thing (along with bridges, tunnels, dams, etc.). Little surprise that I became a civil engineer. Perhaps a little surprise, or irony, that my career has been focused on transportation, close to the ground. Anyway, back in my youth I never asked myself why we built these tall, expensive, monumental structures. An economist will explain that in dense urban environments, where land is in great demand and therefore expensive, building high makes economic sense. Certainly this is true. But I doubt the pharaohs were thinking of economics when they built the great pyramids in Egypt, or that cost was on the mind of the designers of the Chrysler Building, or that economic investment was the real impulse behind the building of Burj Khalifa (Burj Dubai). No, the real reason these iconic structures were built, along with the tens of thousands of other "great" buildings erected by man, was not for economics or any other practical reason, the reason was, is, and will always be: wonder.

Ask yourself how you react when you see a tall building, or long bridge, or high dam. Do you find yourself staring at these creations of man? At our achievements in engineering? We build higher and higher, span greater distances, dam massive rivers, tunnel under water and through mountains. Man has built countless churches, cathedrals, and mosques to the glory of God. But maybe, also, for the glory of himself. Is it a masculine impulse? Perhaps. Are our great buildings absolutely necessary? Perhaps not. But like anything else, great achievements arise from great ambition. And who wants to live in a world where our imaginations don't reach toward the sky?