Thursday, July 16, 2009

New York City's Bridges: Manhattan Bridge

A little north of the Brooklyn Bridge is the Manhattan Bridge. It has a main span length of 1470 ft (448 m), which is a little shorter than the Brooklyn Bridge. It was designed and built by Ralph Modjeski and completed on December 31, 1909.

It has an open top deck with two lanes of vehicle traffic on each side and its bottom deck carries a pedestrian lane, a bicycle lane, four sets of subway tracks, and three reversible lanes.
The photo shows the east side of the Manhattan Bridge surrounded by a gentrified area of Brooklyn. The Manhattan Bridge is not nearly as attractive as the Brooklyn Bridge (in my opinion). Perhaps it looks a little kitschy with its squat steel towers painted a metallic blue. It's a favorite of movie directors and has appeared in many films. In Cloverfield the protagonists are trying to get across the Brooklyn Bridge, which is suddenly attacked by a monster while we see the undisturbed Manhattan Bridge in the background.
Creative Commons License
New York City's Bridges: Manhattan Bridge by Mark Yashinsky is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.

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