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The Triborough Bridge is 70 years old today. As the MTA puts it, the bridge is "actually three bridges, a viaduct, and 14 miles of approach roads connecting Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx." And traveling along it can provide some of the most beautiful views of the city -and the bridges themselves aren't bad. Today, the NY Times looks at the history of the bridge and its creator, Robert Moses. We liked this quote about Moses, the scarily powerful Parks Commissioner:
“He was a visionary,” said Robert Del Bagno, exhibitions manager at the Transit Museum in Brooklyn Heights, where “The Triborough Bridge: Robert Moses and the Automobile Age” is on display through next year.And Moses' biographer, Robert Caro, adds that this is "one of the good things he did. He tied together Long Island, Manhattan and the mainland with a single bridge...It was a supreme example of building a huge public work in a democracy."“We’re steering clear of casting judgment,” Mr. Del Bagno added. “We will tell you that the Triborough led to suburbanization. We stop short of saying it led to urban sprawl. Both are true. The city changed very radically from that point on.”
Check out the "triborough" tag on Flickr for some great photographs.
Photograph by world of pj on Flickr
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One of my favorite quotes about Triborough is in the NY documentary when (I think it's Robert A.M. Stern. Maybe someone can help me out with that. ) they say how the land masses that converge at NYC rush together but are ultimately separated by water and Triborough stitched back together what nature tore apart. It's a pretty powerful testimony to man reshaping his environment which NYC is perhaps the ultimate example. NYC and Triborough truly are monuments to man's achievement.
Bob Moses: "Critics never built anything"
After a year and a half I'm only half way through Caro's 1400 page all-encompassing account of Moses life. It's that dense.
Though the bio certainly reflects a bias against Moses - justified, and supported by most of NYers - it is amazing that ONE PERSON could have so much influence over the 'finger-print' of the world's greatest city.
True Fact: Despite building the majority of NYC's metro roadways, bridges and tunnels Robert Moses never learned how to drive a car!!!
Caro's The Power Broker is an excelent book that just takes forever to read. As for Robert Moses, I am convinced that he is responsible for the anarchy in the Bronx in the 1970s and 1980s. Can you say Cross-Bronx Expressway? Sure he did good, but he also did a lot of evil.
I think we can all agree that there was a lot of good as well as bad that came out of Moses' vision. There was a lot of discussion about how he was passionate about traffic and "the flow." I think what it ultimately boiled down to is that Robert Moses provided the infrastructure to save New York from strangling itself but in the end he forgot that New York was the destination - it wasn't just something to be passed through on the road to somewhere else. I think it was a fact he just never comprehended. While it's obviously a bad idea to concentrate that much power in one man, in today's world of design by committee (hello Ground Zero) maybe giving yourself over to a visionary isn't such a bad thing as long as their is an empowered representative of the people to keep them in check. Back in the day we had LaGuardia. Who knows? Maybe Bloomberg could be the new LaGuardia.
Robert Moses controlled the pursestrings for pretty much all transportation policy in the city for a good 40 years. He's pretty much the reason why we're still using an early-20th Century subway in the 21st. If it weren't for Moses and his single-minded pursuit of more highways, we'd have the Second Avenue subway, additional lines in eastern and northern Queens, and we'd have avoided the worst of the delayed-maintenance policy of the '70s and '80s.
Thanks, Robert Moses.
Robert Moses controlled the pursestrings for pretty much all transportation policy in the city for a good 40 years. He's pretty much the reason why we're still using an early-20th Century subway in the 21st. If it weren't for Moses and his single-minded pursuit of more highways, we'd have the Second Avenue subway, additional lines in eastern and northern Queens, and we'd have avoided the worst of the delayed-maintenance policy of the '70s and '80s.
Thanks, Robert Moses.
As always, the guy who actually designed and built the bridge gets no mention. Othmar Ammann designed, the Triboro, the George Washington, the Throgs Neck, The Whitestone, the Verrazano Narrows and the Outer Crossing. He was also the assistant engineer for the Hell Gate bridge (the arch bridge shown in the photograph above).
In a documentary on Ammann's work, the filmmakers pointed out how at the opening ceremony of the Verrazano Narrows, Robert Moses spoke of the great engineer without ever mentioning him by mane. In that same film Donald Trump is shown saying how he attended that ceremony with his father and the snub given to Ammann convinced him to always display his own name on all of his buildings and properties.
As always, the guy who actually designed and built the bridge gets no mention. Othmar Ammann designed, the Triboro, the George Washington, the Throgs Neck, The Whitestone, the Verrazano Narrows and the Outer Crossing. He was also the assistant engineer for the Hell Gate bridge (the arch bridge shown in the photograph above).
In a documentary on Ammann's work, the filmmakers pointed out how at the opening ceremony of the Verrazano Narrows, Robert Moses spoke of the great engineer without ever mentioning him by mane. In that same film Donald Trump is shown saying how he attended that ceremony with his father and the snub given to Ammann convinced him to always display his own name on all of his buildings and properties.
As usual, the real designer and builder doesn't get mention. Othmar Ammann designed and built, not only the Triboro but also, the George Washington, the Throgs Neck, the Whitestone, the Verrazano Narrows, and the Bayone.
In a documentary about Ammann, the filmakers noted how, at the opening ceremnoy of the Verrazanno Narrows Bridge, Robert Moses talked about "the great engineer" without ever mentioning his name. Donald Trump is also shown on the film talking about how he attended the ceremony with his father and the snub given to Ammann convinced him to always display his name on anything he built.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Othmar_Ammann
Oh and I forgot to add that Othmar Ammann was the assitant engineer on the Hell Gate railroad bridge (the arch bridge shown in the picture above). He was also a consulting engineer on the Golden Gate bridge in San Franciso. Amman had a design for the GWB that was rejected but was very close to what the Golden Gate ended up as a few years later.
Oh, I am so sorry! I just kept refreshing and, seeing nothing posted again.
My apologies.