Manhattan Bridge
The Manhattan Bridge is a suspension bridge that crosses the East River in New York City, connecting Lower Manhattan at Canal Street with Downtown Brooklyn. The bridge was designed by Leon Moisseiff, built by The Phoenix Bridge Company, and opened to traffic on December 31, 1909. It is one of four toll-free vehicular bridges connecting Manhattan Island to Long Island; the nearby Brooklyn Bridge is just slightly further downtown, while the Queensboro and Williamsburg bridges are to the north. It was the first suspension bridge to employ Josef Melan’s deflection theory for deck stiffening.
About Manhattan Bridge in brief
The Manhattan Bridge is a suspension bridge that crosses the East River in New York City, connecting Lower Manhattan at Canal Street with Downtown Brooklyn. The bridge was designed by Leon Moisseiff, built by The Phoenix Bridge Company, and opened to traffic on December 31, 1909. It is one of four toll-free vehicular bridges connecting Manhattan Island to Long Island; the nearby Brooklyn Bridge is just slightly further downtown, while the Queensboro and Williamsburg bridges are to the north. It was the first suspension bridge to employ Josef Melan’s deflection theory for deck stiffening, resulting in the first use of a lightly-webbed weight-saving Warren truss for its construction. Considered the forerunner of modern suspension bridges, it served as the model for many of the record-breaking spans built in theFirst half of the twentieth century. The main span is 1,480 ft long, with the suspension cables being 3,224 ft long. The last of the suspender ropes supporting the main cables was strung in December of that year. The construction of the bridge span required 30,000 tons of steel. The first temporary wire between the Manhattan Bridge’s two towers was str Hung in June 1908. The New York Times criticized it as’meaningless’ and lobbied for one after Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay, and railed that the span would have geographical and historical significance if it were known as the Wallabout Bridge. In 1910, after the bridge opened, the architectural firm Carrère Hastings drew up preliminary plans for an elaborate Greek Revival entry to the bridge on the Manhattan side.
Shortly after opening, a fire damaged the structure on the Brooklyn side of the structure. In the earliest plans it was to have been called ‘Bridge No. 3’, but was given the name ‘Manhattan Bridge’ in 1902. In 1905, the Times renewed its campaign, stating, ‘When there was only one, it was well enough to call it the Brooklyn Bridge, or theEast River Bridge’ The bridge’s design was controversial at the time of its construction and opening, and had been seen as aesthetically unappealing as part of the City Beautiful movement as well as the ‘City Beautiful’ movement of the 1920s and ’30s. A group of 100 citizens of Brooklyn walked the bridge over December 5, 1909, marking the unofficial completion over the bridge. In 1908, the bridge was officially opened by outgoing Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. The Manhattan Bridge was the last of three suspension spans built across the lower East River, following the Brooklyn and Williamsburgh Bridges. The Brooklyn Bridge was later renamed ‘The Brooklyn Bridge’, and the Williamsburg Bridge became the ‘Williamsburg Bridge’ It was to be replaced later with two sets of permanent, thicker main cables, each 21 inches thick, in pairs on both sides of thebridge’s deck. In May 1904, a USD 10 million grant for the bridge’s construction was granted in May 1904 with the expectation that work on the span. By this time, the construction cost had increased to USD 22 million.
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This page is based on the article Manhattan Bridge published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 03, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
