Delancey Street footbridge

With the East Side Coastal Resiliency project now in its third year, we're starting to see signs that East River Park may one day be once again more than a muddy construction site filled with excavators and lengths of concrete pipe. Back in March 2022, the old footbridge that crossed the FDR Drive at Delancey Street was taken down, literally torn apart with grabs and jackhammers overnight and trucked away in pieces.

This month saw the installation of its replacement, a far larger and much fancier bridge. Initial designs for the park’s facelift depicted a kind of garden bridge, a curving concrete ramp with flowerbeds and trees to break up its brutalist outlines. This version didn't survive the revision process, perhaps because no one could figure out how to install it without closing down the FDR Drive for an extended period, something that is anathema to the automobile-friendly minds at the city’s planning department.

In its place we got a new design for a simpler, tied-arch steel bridge that could be put in place much more quickly. The new Delancey Street bridge, like its smaller twin at Corlears Hook, was fabricated in Italy, where they apparently still know how to build bridges cheaply. From there, it was shipped in pieces to the United States and delivered to a staging area about a quarter mile south of its intended location, where it was put together like a giant piece of furniture.

The installation plan called for the bridge to be literally driven up the FDR Drive from the staging area to Delancey Street. The whole structure was assembled on top of a pair of sturdy wheeled platforms – self-propelled modular transporters – that were apparently well up to the task of moving something over two hundred feet in length and massing more than a hundred and twenty-five tons.

Whatever one’s feelings about the project as a whole, there’s no denying that the people executing the plan seem to know what they’re doing. A small army of workers descended on the scene one night, closed off the FDR Drive, and began briskly removing the concrete Jersey barriers that divide up the highway. With the barriers removed, the bridge was simply driven out of the staging area and up the highway.

There was something of a party atmosphere. People from the neighborhood turned out to watch the process, snapping selfies in front of the bridge as it inched past up the road. The workers who’d finished their jobs ate pizza from boxes piled on the rear of a tractor. Someone joked that the governor – who’d recently reversed direction on New York City’s planned congestion charge – had changed her mind and it needed to go back where it started. One of the workers said ”I'm union. We can move it back and forth all year, as long as I get overtime.”

The whole process was surprisingly calm. The transporters carrying the bridge were not quite noiseless, but nearly so. At one point, busy taking photographs of the barrier removal process at the destination site, I turned around and was surprised to see that the bridge had glided up behind me. Even the final placement, as the transporters pivoted their wheels to slew the whole structure across the highway, ready to be lifted into place, was practically silent, without any dramatic roar of engines.

Once the bridge had been delivered to its resting place, the huge cranes took over. The specialists fussed over the attachments for a while, and then the cranes calmly lifted the whole thing into the air. The management team that had overseen the project posed for photographs in front of it – “Please look at the drone,” the photographer from the documentation team urged them – and the bridge was lowered into place.

And that, aside from some minor clean-up, was pretty much that. The process of putting the finished bridge into place probably took less than six hours all told. The planners who were so determined not to close the highway any longer than necessary got their wish. And we got a new bridge.