Another Coincidence

First I wrote about the CRRNJ terminal and then it appeared it a comic book; now I wrote about the University Heights bridge a couple of months ago and last week found myself walking across it. The bridge is one of the group over the Harlem River, between upper Manhattan and the Bronx. This particular bridge connects 207th Street in Manhattan with Fordham Road in the Bronx. The bridge is currently being painted, so my views of it were quite limited. In the picture above, from the approach span on the west (Manhattan) side, you can see the painters’ shroud over the trusswork. What I really want to take about is the thing in front of the bridge proper over the sidewalk, but first some truss porn:

The green walls on both side are painted plywood, protecting pedestrians from the painting process; the 35-year-old replacement truss is above. But back to that thing over the sidewalk, there are four of them, two at each end of the bridge. Here are the two on the Bronx side, from the main span:

The thing on the right is a swing gate used to block the sidewalk and east-bound lanes when the bridge opens, which has been temporally disabled by the chain-link fence; and there’s a second swing gate up ahead. I suspect the fence is a good way to judge how often the bridge opens these days. The things, which I’m going to call shelters because that’s what Wikipedia calls them, each have six legs supporting some decorative iron, and a wood-rafter hip roof. Those things on the left sure look like massive (for the scale of the shelters) iron gates that could be used to block the sidewalk. Here’s a view fo the western shelter of the Manahttan-sde pair, and again, that sure looks like a gate:

This last photo gives you a good view of the decorative iron fence and, way off in the distance, the elevated 207th Street station.

If someone suggested gates on the Brooklyn Bridge walkway in 1890 (and maybe today) to prevent people from crossing, it would be seen as a wry commentary on the sometime fraught relationship between Manhattan, the original core of New York, and the formerly-independent city of Brooklyn, which has had a larger population than Manhattan for quite some time. But the Bronx had no such independent past: it was semi-suburbia and farmland when it was swallowed by New York in two big gulps, in 1874 and 1895. Even as a joke, blocking off transit makes no sense.

If the idea of those gates was to provide safety for pedestrians during bridge openings, they would have required an operator at each gate, as they look heavy. And if that was the purpose, why do the shelters further from the edge need gates? Why shelters at all – to protect pedestrians from bad weather when temporarily stuck by the bridge opening? The landmarks designation report simply calls them “sidewalk shelters” which doesn’t address the mystery of their existence.

I have a suspicion that the explanation involves a long-ago over-estimate of the frequency of the bridge being opened, the number of pedestrians, or both.