Rich Mintz  

Here’s one that you may not know even if you’re a New Yorker. The Outerbridge Crossing is a bridge over the Arthur Kill, which connects the southern tip of Staten Island (in New York City) with Perth Amboy, New Jersey. Here you see its location in convenient map form:

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It is in fact a bridge, and it is the outermost (southernmost and westernmost) overwater crossing between New York City and the rest of the universe. However, it is not named for that collection of facts; it is in fact named for a man named Eugenius Outerbridge, who was the first chairman of the Port Authority.

That seems so implausible that when I heard it a couple of weeks ago I simply didn’t believe it, but as you can see I looked it up and the consensus of the universe is that it is true!  Imagine if London’s Embankment Station turned out to have been named for a hydrological engineer named George A. Embankment. Well, this is even more implausible… and yet TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION.

Urban walkability is a chicken-and-egg problem. In many cities, municipalities and businesses don’t invest in relatively cheap promoters of pleasant walkability (better sidewalks, street furniture, pedestrian-oriented displays — nevermind things like zoning changes and parking reconfiguration that require political will) because there’s a perception that “nobody walks.” And people are disinclined to walk because there’s a perception that “walking is unpleasant.”

Which is why I’m always excited to see signage like this in American cities, in urban cores and near transit stations and so forth. (This photo courtesy of John Massengale.)

Actually, that’s London, which isn’t an American city, and of course they do it better than we do, but increasingly it’s showing up here, too. Like in this photo — you can see a large, easy-to-use city map on the oblique (left-facing) side of the kiosk at right, which are placed all around the central core of …

… Montreal. Doh! But I swear, Americans are catching up, at their typical slow-but-steady pace. And the quality is improving. WMATA just announced that they’re improving their walk maps in Metro stations. A sample (click map image to enlarge; download full map, 2.7 MB PDF):

That map’s too busy, but it’s a lot better than the current iteration. We need more of this — this sort of thing is part of the evidence people need that changing their longstanding behavior is a rational thing to consider.

Thanks to Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, and a passel of other inflammatory scab-pickers, the country’s been newly reminded that the World Trade Center site is still mostly a big hole in the ground. Those of us who live here, and deal daily with the dislocation of living a few blocks from a gigantic construction site, with arterial streets running along both sides and half a dozen subway lines in continuous service underneath and around it, don’t need reminding. (For the record: “yes” on the Islamic cultural center, which is six blocks from my house. Muslims were living and working in this neighborhood long before I moved in.)

There’s a piece of the project that isn’t about the World Trade tower reconstruction, isn’t about the memorial, that’s much more important than these to those of us who live down here. And that’s the Fulton Street Transit Center construction, which is just over halfway through its nine-year construction. It got a kick in the pants from the WTC project, and a $424-million-dollar jolt of energy from the stimulus, but we needed it in any case.

Being built mostly by Skanska USA, the Swedish construction behemoth you’ve never heard of but that dominates civil engineering projects here in New York, the project will link 13 underground train lines that currently pass through about six unconnected station complexes, serving hundreds of thousands of people a day. These train lines currently run through infrastructure that’s as old as the subway system itself, and they all have to continue running throughout the duration of the project, so this constitutes a massive project from the standpoint of both capital investment and logistics.

We see the logistics everywhere in Lower Manhattan, where we’re constantly detouring around construction equipment, Skanska employees, and Jersey barriers on the sidewalk and in the street. Fulton Street has been torn up, for this and other projects, the entire time I’ve been living in New York. (DeLury Park opens next month!) But the project is sorely needed, and those of us living and working down here are trying to be patient. When it’s done, we’ll have a shiny new station and vastly improved transit usability down here in Manhattan’s original dense urban neighborhood.

I’m curious about why the I-95 viaduct through downtown Bridgeport (seen here) is so high. It’s high enough that you could pass a pretty tall ship through the western channel, which is spanned by part of it — despite the fact that the river(s) doesn’t/don’t appear, from the map, to be navigable very far upstream. Note also that the railroad bridge, which is only a little ways upstream, isn’t nearly as tall, so it’s not like your pirate ship or whatever could get past that (although there may be a drawbridge on that one — it’s hard to tell from the satellite photo, and there’s certainly one on the Congress Street bridge just upstream from there — it’s open in the photo).

Aside from being the birthplace of (allegedly) the Frisbee, and of Subway, and a major brassiere manufacturing hub, I learned nothing much about the industrial history of Bridgeport from Wikipedia, except that there was a lot of it for a long time and now there isn’t so much. Nothing mentioned about a shipyard. So presumably once upon a time, maybe even 15 or 20 years ago, there was just a lot of supply and trade shipping going on along that west channel (which appears to be the mouth of the Pequonnock River, although it’s hard to be sure).

But there isn’t now. So what gives? That elevated highway must have cost a fortune, and doesn’t look that old, so there must have been a reason…

Update: It’s not old; the project didn’t even start until 1996. Here’s lots of detail from Construction Equipment Guide (yes, that’s a thing).