I always thought the Williamsburg Bridge was damned ugly.
Posted on 01/21/2014 1:34:24 PM PST by Impala64ssa
David Capobianco was a toddler in 1964 when the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge slowly soared over his neighborhood of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and tethered it to Staten Island. As he grew up, the improbable notion of assembling something so big and of such gossamer design propelled him to become a civil engineer.
Now after years of public argument and indecision, the first new colossal steel bridge in the New York area since the Verrazano is finally beginning to rise over one of the most spacious stretches of the Hudson River, a replacement for the decaying Tappan Zee, the longest bridge in the state, and Mr. Capobianco, 51, is its project manager.
“All other projects I’ve worked on are dwarfed by this — the size of the equipment involved, the enormity of what we’re doing, the number of people involved,” he said.
From a small boat on the gunmetal waters of the Hudson, weaving among an archipelago of stout barges and giraffe-like cranes, the scale of the work in progress is impressive. The eight-lane bridge — actually two parallel spans — that will stretch across a 3.1-mile breadth of the river between Tarrytown in Westchester County and South Nyack in Rockland County will by some measures be the widest in the world.
By Christmas, dock builders on floating barges had used hydraulically driven vibrating hammers to pound 28 piles — steel tubes up to six feet in diameter and up to 300 feet long — into the bottom of the Hudson River, some drilled into bedrock, others held by the sheer density of the riverbed muck.
A thousand piles will eventually be needed, so workers are hustling at a pace of eight piles every two weeks, although they have been slowed by the recent bitter cold.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Is this the famous bridge of “bridgegate” ?
Name it the Detroit bridge!
5 years just to sink the required number of pilings?
How compromised is the current Tappan Zee Bridge?
No.
To soften the underwater sound waves emitted by pile-driving, strong enough to kill fish, workers surround each pile with a “bubble curtain,” a square enclosure fitted with a compressor that produces sound-dampening bubbles. …Wuh-oh. How do they know that the “carbon emissions” of the air compressor won’t kill more fish?
It's a pile of rust.
No. This one is all in New York State, and it’s 18 miles north of the George Washington Bridge. It’s also controlled by the NY State Thruway Authority versus the Port Authority.
Okay, now I got it. With all the recent focus on Gov. Christie, you forget what bridge was the focus of “bridgegate.” But then again, bad functioning bridges is a scandal in themselves.
Will this impede any water landings in the future ?
Another gift to the labor unions.
I always thought the Williamsburg Bridge was damned ugly.
Not at all for beeber-equipped airliners.
Hey! My great uncle was the architect! I look at it and feel groovy.
I always thought the Williamsburg Bridge was damned ugly.It was until now.
Now it is a work of art compared to the neo monstrosity abuilding at Tappan Zee.
It’s only the longest bridge in NY because a corrupt congressman wanted it in his district instead of where it would have been most effective.
Unfortunate word choice:
enormity: The quality of passing all moral bounds; excessive wickedness or outrageousness.
A monstrous offense or evil; an outrage.
Usage Problem. Great size; immensity: "Beyond that, [Russia's] sheer enormity offered a defense against invaders that no European nation enjoyed" (W. Bruce Lincoln).
There are so many enormities in New York, the project manager of an enormous project shouldn't besmirch his work so.
Will the Cuomo government allow people to work on the project if they are not registered as democrats, communists or socialists?
I always thought the people who designed these bridges were birds or something. The new ones soar into the air - real nightmares for acrophobes.
Looks like a Playmobil set.
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