Kosciuszko Bridge (New York City)
in undefined, United StatesCategory: Attraction
5 views 
0 shares 
0 comments
set bookmark!
Created/changed by:
System
Address details
Kosciusko Bridge, Long Island City, NY 11101, USA Print route »
Phone & WWW
Business hours
Info
The Kosciuszko Bridge is a bridge over Newtown Creek in New York City, connecting Greenpoint in Brooklyn to Maspeth in Queens. The current bridge on the site, a cable-stayed bridge, opened in April 2017 and carries three lanes in each direction. It is one of two planned cable-stayed bridges, with a parallel bridge opening in 2020. An older bridge, a truss bridge of the same name that was located to the north of the first cable-stayed bridge, was originally opened in 1939. It was closed in April 2017 and demolished from July to October 2017.
The crossing is part of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway or BQE, which carries Interstate 278. Throughout its history, the Kosciusko Bridge has been the only bridge over Newtown Creek that is not a drawbridge.
The older truss bridge replaced a swing bridge called the Meeker Avenue Bridge, which connected Meeker Avenue in Brooklyn to Laurel Hill Boulevard in Queens. The old Kosciuszko Bridge, originally also called the Meeker Avenue Bridge, carried six lanes of traffic, three in each direction. In 1940, a year after opening, the bridge was renamed after Polish military leader Tadeusz Kościuszko, who fought alongside the Americans in the American Revolutionary War.
In 2014, a contract was awarded and work begun to build one of two replacement bridges with more capacity, with the first bridge initially carrying bidirectional traffic. The new bridges have the same name as the original bridge, and are both cable-stayed bridges that will eventually each carry one direction of traffic. The first bridge, located south of the old truss bridge, opened on April 27, 2017, with three lanes in each direction. Once the old bridge was demolished via controlled explosion in October 2017, a new westbound cable-stayed bridge with four lanes and a bike/pedestrian path started construction on the site of the old bridge, and the first cable-stayed bridge will become eastbound-only with five lanes when the westbound bridge opens in 2020.
