My Favorite Footbridges
A couple of winters ago, I hadn’t been to the Hudson River waterfront in Washington Heights of late, and had no idea that a new pedestrian bridge was opened in September 2017. I hustled over there on a cold December morning on which the wind was blowing so hard in 15-degree weather I curtailed a planned lengthy waterfront walk. I’m told fingerless gloves may help, but I had trouble holding the camera. I was able to get some spectacular visuals as this was a “severely clear” morning. This was one of the first days of a long cold streak and ice floes hadn’t yet appeared in the Hudson as they would in a few days.
I took the #1 train to the 157th St. station and walked south on Broadway and west on W. 151st St. to Riverside Dr., which here sits high on a bluff overlooking the Henry Hudson Parkway, Amtrak railroad tracks, and the Hudson River. The abutment is protected by molded concrete railings that look like they could survive for centuries.
The new arch bridge is immediately visible from the abutment, but the view would be invisible during the warm months when the trees are filled out. To me it seems like a mini-version of the Hell Gate and Bayonne arch bridges. I’m happy the architects decided not to build a cable-stayed bridge, which is by far the most-employed style these days from the new Kosciuszko and Goethals Bridges as well as the new Tappan Zee (Mario Cuomo) Bridge.
The new Herman D. Farrell Bridge, according to accounts, is fully Americans with Disability Act-compliant, e.g., wheelchair-accessible, though I saw no sign of any ramps on the Riverside Drive end; given the cold and wind, I didn’t go out of my way to look for the ramps but they must be there. The Farrell Bridge crosses both the Henry Hudson Parkway and the railroad tracks. On the Henry Hudson Parkway end, which is ramped into Riverside Park and its bike and pedestrian paths, there are views across the Hudson to Fort Lee, NJ and north to the George Washington Bridge.
Coincident to the opening of the new bridge, Riverbank State Park was also named for Denny Farrell (1932-2018), who was a longtime State Assemblyman, a former Chairman of the NY State Ways and Means Committee and a former Chairman of the Assembly Committee on Banks. An influential politician, Farrell served in the Assembly from 1974 to 2017 and was a chief Democratic Party operative, serving as the Leader of the NY State Democratic Party, Vice-Chair of the New York State Democratic Party, and Chairman of the New York State Democratic Committee. He unsuccessfully “primaried” Ed Koch for mayor in 1985. He retired from public service in 2017 at age 85, and passed away the following year.
As chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, Farrell agreed to name the new cable-stayed Tappan Zee Bridge for Mario Cuomo, the longtime NY State Governor (Mario Cuomo himself had previously named the Tappan Zee for his predecessor, Malcolm Wilson). As part of the deal with Andrew Cuomo, NYS governor on 2017, the new bridge as well as Riverbank State Park now bear Farrell’s name.
I’m an infrastructure buff, so when something like a new pedestrian bridge opens, I’m usually on the scene. Probably the biggest such bridge to open in recent years is the New Kosciusko Bridge, which opened in two parts, the first auto-only bridge in 2017 and the span with the pedestrian-bicycle walk in 2019.
When the new East River Greenway opened in late-2023 I showed up soon after Thanksgiving. Here’s an article in ENR New York from 2021 (sorry if it’s paywalled) explaining the engineering behind the bridge and the Greenway. It’s still young enough to be gleaming chrome and white in color, with the streamlined lampposts so in vogue today: LEDs with no reflector bowls, of course. I’m calling it the 54th Street Bridge, until the City Council gets around to naming it for a politician or local luminary. The bridge is similar in design to the Denny Farrell Bridge spanning the Henry Hudson Parkway.
The element that’s attracted me to Staple St., a two-block alley between Duane and Harrison Sts. just west of Hudson in Tribeca, like a yellow jacket to a picnic for two decades—is its footbridge. It’s made of cast iron and has picture windows along the sides, and originally connected the third floors of the former New York Hospital House of Relief, or as we say today, emergency room—with the laundry/stables. The Landmarks Designation Report states merely that it’s a “later addition, designer undetermined” but it can be no older than 1907. I suppose I’m fascinated with it because while there are many older or more recent pedestrian footbridges connecting buildings around town, they’re usually high above the street, and this one spans one of NYC’s more obscure alleys. It’s Staple St.’s trademark—the alley’s hidden nature has saved it.
While both NYH buildings were converted to residential as early as the 1980s, the accessibility of the bridge is a mystery to me.
I’d no idea that a new pedestrian bridge spanning West St. (formerly the West Side Highway) opened during 2021; like the Denny Farrell Bridge in Washington Heights, I didn’t know it existed until I saw it. It was constructed in tandem with the new 64-story residential skyscraper, 50 West and connects JP Ward Street (a tiny thoroughfare at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel) with W. Thames St. in Battery Park City.
The Architectural Record calls the Robert R. Douglass Bridge “the last piece of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s (LMDC) plan for rebuilding and restoring the area below Houston Street affected by the destruction of the World Trade Center towers.” That’s quite a claim! The lenticular truss bridge took seven years and $45 million to complete and is the handsomest of the pedestrian spans across West St. with the possible exception of the bridge at Chambers St. leading to Stuyvesant High School. The bridge was named for the late head of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
The Douglass Bridge was fabricated in metal shops in New York and Pennsylvania and assembled in Red Hook, Brooklyn until it was ready to be positioned, and was moved by barge up the bay. An open design permits views up and down West St., and that can get pretty chilly in the winter.
Until about a decade ago, this rickety pedestrian bridge spanned the LIRR at 216th St. It was deemed too far gone to repair, and so today there are no pedestrian crossings between Bell Blvd. and 221st St. The bridge’s concrete foundations had been in decline since 2006. Plans for an Americans with Disabilities Act-compliant staircase with winding ramps were blocked by the local community board, said the Department of Transportation, so the blame for no replacement may lie with them. The steps were steep and difficult to ascend on both sides. The bridge had two lamps, little more than pipes with electrical wires supporting sodium vapor “bucket” lamps.
Some markings on the bridge by local youth. This is a movie reference: the semi-documentary Kids is centered on a day in the life of a group of teenagers in New York City and their hedonistic behavior towards sex and substance abuse (alcohol and other street drugs) during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the mid-1990s.
There are other Port Washington branch pedestrian crossings remaining in Elmhurst, Broadway (Flushing), Bayside and Little Neck. All have different designs, but each is old except the one on Little Neck.
—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).