Sometimes An Ugly Duckling Becomes An Ugly Duck

For a long time, most of New York’s waterfront was industrial. Some still is: that’s Long Island City in the picture above, a stone’s throw from the East River but somehow ungentrified. In the background on the right is the Queensboro Bridge. It’s a cantilever truss with three unequal spans: over the east channel of the river, Roosevelt Island, and the west channel of the river. It also has some identity issues, being named at various times the Queensboro Bridge, the Welfare Island Bridge (after an old name for Roosevelt Island), the Blackwell’s Island Bridge (after a very old name for Roosevelt Island), the 59th Street Bridge, and the Edward I. Koch Bridge.

New York is a city of long-span suspension bridges, and it’s hard for a cantilever truss to complete on looks. A truly beautiful cantilever truss, like the Forth Bridge, can hold its own against any competition, but the Queensboro is not truly beautiful. It’s asymmetrical (the slope of the end spans is different because of different elevations of land in Manhattan and Queens, and the length of the two channel spans is different) and it’s a very heavy design in part because it originally carried a roadway, trains, and trolleys. Compare to the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges downstream, or the Verrazano Narrows, it’s ungainly and visually heavy.

Seen from the upper-deck roadway, it feels almost like a tunnel with windows, which is especially ironic as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a poetic description of the view from it.

The most damning description came from a man who helped design it. The structure of the bridge was design by a team led by Gustav Lindenthal. As the directions of forces in a truss like this are typically known, he was able to distinguish tension from compression members for efficiency: the tension members are ganged eyebars, while the compression members are built-up laced boxes. The architect Henry Hornbostel was brought into the design to civilize it architecturally; as far as I know he’s responsible for the ornamental pinnacles on the towers and some trim on the end portals, and that’s about it. Hornbostel has been widely quoted as saying, upon seeing the completed bridge “My God, it’s a blacksmith’s shop!” Over a hundred years later, I’m not sure there’s anything else to add.