Building a very large city on several large islands, a bunch of small ones, and a piece of the mainland means that you will build a lot of bridges. New York has bridges, including four former record-holders for the longest main span, one of which may well be the most-photographed bridge in the world. The bridge in the photo above is nowhere near as famous. It’s the Bayonne Bridge, connecting Staten Island to Bayonne, New Jersey, across the Kill Van Kull, one of the tidal straits that separate New York’s islands. And it should be more famous. (That’s Staten Island in the foreground, Newark Bay on the left, and Kill Van Kull and Bayonne on the right.)
Bayonne Bridge is a through-arch, where the deck is partly above and partly below the arch proper. (The through-arch tag in the HABS/HAER index is how I got to this topic; the photo above is from the 1985 HAER survey.) It’s also a whole lot of steel:
The bridge was designed by Othmar Ammann, with Cass Gilbert acting as a consulting architect. (When the design took place, Gilbert was the architect of the tallest building in the world. Having him as a consultant on the bridge says something about the scale of the project.) Ammann was an immensely talented engineer, both as a designer and in terms of supervising construction. He not only worked on many of the suspension bridges that connect New York, he worked on the longest main-span suspension bridge twice, at George Washington and Verrazzano-Narrows. He also is one of the stars of The Bridge, Gay Talese’s story of the construction of Verrazzano-Narrows.
Bayonne, completed almost simultaneously with George Washington after the Great Depression began, suffered from the same cost-cutting as GW: stone cladding for the steel was removed from the project. At GW, it was the towers that were to have been clad, and the appearance of the bridge is probably improved by having the steel bare. At Bayonne it was a pair of fake abutments, at the ends of the arch between the deck above and the real abutment at grade. The cube of relatively-lightweight steel seen below is unneeded, and is basically the support for the non-existent stone:
The fake abutment was put in the design to visually anchor the top chord of the arch, which is, at its ends, not carrying any thrust, just serving to stiffen the lower chord. As it is, the top chord ends in the tangle of small pieces of steel, which is the only part of the design that doesn’t look good.
To give a sense of the scale of Bayonne, it’s slightly longer than the much-more-famous Sydney Harbor Bridge. But in a city of very big suspension bridges, it doesn’t seem that big. And with most of the bridges in the city having at least one end in heavily-built up areas, the location of Bayonne seems out of the way. To go back to how I began this blog post: you know you have a lot of bridges when you can misplace something this big.
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