Big Apple History . Building the Big Apple . The Triborough Bridge


	The Triborough Bridge is finally completed.

Moses' accomplishments in New York City were not limited to his role as City Parks Commissioner. Before Moses started work on it in the mid-1930s, the Triborough Bridge was known as "the Bridge to Nowhere" because for years a small but prominent part of it stood unfinished. As Chairman of the Triborough Bridge Committee, Moses completed the bridge in 1936.

Each of the bridge's girders is so big that one barge wasn't big enough to carry it. In order to get a single girder to the bridge's building site, teams of men tied together four or five barges. The bridge required so much concrete that cement factories throughout the Eastern United States that closed as a result of the Great Depression were re-opened just to make the concrete for the bridge. To make the wood for the forms that held the concrete, whole forests were cut down in Oregon.

5,000 men at a time worked directly on the bridge. These men were only the ones actually put the bridge together; tens of thousands more worked to prepare the materials that made up the bridge. Completing the bridge took 31 million work-hours, in 134 cities, across 20 states. In the middle of the Depression this project was so huge that it alone buoyed the economy of the whole country.

For La Guardia, the bridge was a symbol of his new, productive, honest government. He said, "We are going to build a bridge instead of patronage. We are going to pile up stone and steel instead of expenses. We are going to build a bridge of steel, and spell steel 's-t-e-e-l' instead of 's-t-e-a-l.' The people of the City of New York are going to pay for that bridge, and they are going to pay for it in tolls after its completion." The tolls turned out to be a source of income for Moses' projects, after they quickly paid for the bridge's hefty expense.

The Triborough Bridge was like no bridge that had come before it. It united three Boroughs of New York: Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens. It remains the largest vertical-lift bridge in the world. The Triborough Bridge is a combination of roadways and bridges. It joins three giant bridges into one and consists of 13,500 feet of elevated viaduct and fourteen miles of roadway, all traveling over Randall's and Ward's Islands.

In 1936, when the bridge was completed, it was considered one of the greatest accomplishments of mankind. The Art Deco detailing, the clover-leaf arrangement of ramps connecting the parks and the boroughs, the complicated and beautiful engineering -- it was highway-building elevated to the level of sculpture.