Photo Courtesy of Kevin P. Coughlin/Office of the Governor
The new span of the bridge officially opened to traffic in both directions last Thursday night.
By Forum Staff
Elected officials, dignitaries, and community leaders from Queens and Brooklyn recently celebrated the grand opening of the first span of the new Kosciuszko Bridge.
The span – the first new bridge constructed in New York City since the Verrazano Bridge in 1964 – officially opened to traffic in both directions last Thursday at 11:30 p.m.
“New York is making unprecedented investments to revitalize our transportation infrastructure, ensuring that our roads and bridges are fully equipped to meet the needs of the 21st century traveler,” Gov. Andrew Cuomo said. “The opening of the first span of the Kosciuszko Bridge is a major milestone for New York City that will serve hundreds of thousands of commuters every day. This new bridge will ease congestion and improve our region’s transportation network while demonstrating that the Empire State continues to lead the nation in building state-of-the-art infrastructure projects that will serve New Yorkers for generations to come.”
According to the State, the Kosciuszko Bridge project replaces the existing 78-year-old bridge with two new state-of-the-art cable-stayed bridges – one Queens-bound and one Brooklyn-bound. The original Kosciuszko Bridge first opened in 1939 under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration. Additionally, the $555 million Phase I project is the largest single contract the State Department of Transportation has ever undertaken – resulting in the construction of the Queens-bound bridge, which includes three lanes of traffic in each direction until the completion of Phase II. The new bridge, which connects Maspeth and Greenpoint, will benefit approximately 200,000 commuters each day and has a service life of 100 years, Cuomo said.
“After years of planning and construction, I am thrilled that the first span of the new Kosciusko Bridge will finally be open for public use,” said U.S. Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Astoria). “With this bridge, we reinvigorate New York’s tradition of bold infrastructure projects that move our economy forward. The old bridge was widely regarded as the worst bridge in the state, and so I fought for, and secured $670 million in federal funds— nearly 85-percent of the total cost of building both spans—so we could start over and give Queens and Brooklyn a bridge to be proud of. Today we are thrilled to have a new, beautiful, state-of-the-art span in place of the old, crumbling, dangerous eyesore. I want to thank Governor Cuomo for seeing the first span through to completion, and look forward to continuing to work with him on the second span.”
The new Kosciuszko Bridge is the city’s first cable-stayed bridge, featuring a total of 56 stay cables made up of approximately one million linear feet of steel strands. A cable-stayed bridge uses steel cables placed at an angle to connect the bridge deck to vertical towers that extend high above the roadway, with the pylon tower of the Kosciuszko Bridge measuring 287 feet high. Additionally, each of the 3,850 tons of structural steel used to construct the new bridge was manufactured in the United States. The bridge measures 1,001 feet in length and 99 feet in width.
