The Manhattan Bridge opened for subway service in 1915, and from that point to the early 1980s carried more Brooklynites to work in Manhattan than any other piece of infrastructure. In the 1950s, engineers recommended that tunnels be built to take the subway trains off the bridge and eliminate the stress of having heavy trains pass over it and flex it. Then in the 1970s, with a huge share of the city tax base dedicated to debt and pensions, the parts of the bridge that allowed it to flex were left to rust and corrode, leading to cracking and deterioration. As a result, half the bridge was closed to subway traffic for nearly 20 years, severely degrading subway service around the southern rim of Brooklyn, from Bay Ridge and Sunset Park in the west to Sheepshead Bay, Midwood, and Flatbush to the east. While at City Planning, I produced data that showed that these neighborhoods had a falling share of people commuting to work by subway, and falling income, relative to other areas of Brooklyn that did not rely on the bridge. Somehow no Brooklyn politicians ever noticed all the extra time required to get work, and the extra crowding. For the limited number of people who matter it wasn’t an issue. SUV parking was more important. A whole generation passed with many people never knowing what subway service in Brooklyn was supposed go be like.
Proposals to connect the BMT tracks from DeKalb to the Rutgers Street Tunnel (which carries the F), to reduce the traffic over the bridge and provide an alternative in case of future outages, were scrapped because of the massive prices contractors charge the MTA. Eventually, the bridge was fully reopened to subway traffic. But as the person who was then identified as the only one in favor of that project, I was not happy to have an architect I’ve corresponded with over the years call my attention to this video.
Now an engineer I correspond with says the bridge is supposed to flex, and would be wrecked if it didn’t. But given the soaring costs of debt and pensions, and the priorities of Generation Greed, would anyone be surprised if the bridge were left to corrode again, leading to another outage? There is such a thing as metal fatigue, after all. Given what is happening to our infrastructure as Generation Greed drains the future resources of the United States, I’m glad I now ride a bicycle to work most days. But when they get through with us, perhaps we won’t even be able to do that.
I got up at 3 am to ride the first revenue train in years over one side of the bridge, and then ride back on the other side. Just as I arrived in the middle of the night to ride the first revenue train to South Ferry following 9/11, and was the first passengers at the re-opened (and since re-closed) Cortlandt Street station on the BMT. So I am troubled that recovery of the transit system has been a false dawn, as a result of the ascendance of the “what about my needs” generation. When I talk about the future shutdown of large parts of the city’s infrastructure due to bankruptcy and neglect, it isn’t a fantasy. It’s history, in a state there the official motto is Excelsior (ever upward) but the reality is Tondere and Aufugere (fleece and flee).