Every one of these Construction History posts has been about a real structure, and some of you may be wondering why you don’t know the North River Bridge. That’s because it was sort of never built – some 45 years after it was first proposed, a version of it was constructed as the George Washington Bridge (above).
Gustave Lindenthal was an accomplished engineer, who designed or led the design team for a number of famous bridges. But he never got to build his dream, which was the North River Bridge. He first proposed it in the 1880s, and its location shifted a bit over the years, but was usually crossing the Hudson River from somewhere in midtown Manhattan. (“North River” as a name for the lower Hudson goes back to the Dutch colony, which was concentrated between the Delaware River and the Hudson River, making the Delaware the South River and the Hudson the North River.) Here’s the 1921 version:
It’s hard to overstate the size of that proposal. The Hudson at midtown is about 4000 feet across, so the main span would have been about the same as the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge; the lower deck was supposed to carry 12 tracks for “steam railroad and rapid transit” while the upper deck had something like 20 lanes of vehicular traffic, pedestrian walkways, and trolley tracks. In the 1880s, this proposal was meant to establish a rail connection between Manhattan and the west, but by 1920 Penn Station had opened, so this was to get all the other railroads in New Jersey (the Erie, the Lackawanna, the NJ Central, the B&O, the West Shore, and others) into New York. The plan was fascinating from the engineering side but, honestly, over the top. And the railroads didn’t want to pay for it, which left it unfunded.
The Port Authority of New York, founded about the same time that the drawing above was published, had the money, and didn’t really want to work with the huge private organizations that were the railroads, so it eventually built a bridge for cars and pedestrian only, uptown where land was cheaper and the river narrower. A different exceptionally talented engineer, Othmar Ammann, led the design. But you can argue that Lindenthal was more right than people recognized, given that we still need to increase rail capacity across the river and that the George Washington Bridge had to have a second deck added to carry the flood of vehicles. For some time, the GW has held the record for most vehicular crossings in an average day.
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