I’ve written before about the Washington Bridge over the Harlem River – not to be confused with the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson River about a mile away – with good reason. There’s an argument to be made that this small (for NYC) bridge is the most beautiful in the city. From some unspecified publication and collected in a New York Public Library scrapbook:
In formal terms, the bridge is two spans of two-hinged steel arches, with lattice spandrels above. Each arch is actually six parallel plate girders. It was completed in 1888 and has two 510-foot main spans because of the configuration of the Harlem River: the ground in both Manhattan and the Bronx is quite hilly at the latitude of 181st Street, but there is a stretch of low land on the Bronx (east) side of the river that served first as a convenient place to run a rail line and later a highway. So the west span runs over the river and the east over the tracks and road. Here’s a wider view from around 1890, looking south to the High Bridge aqueduct, and with Highbridge Park on the right looking exceptionally bucolic:
Analyzing one’s personal taste and aesthetics is a losing game, but that doesn’t mean I can’t try. The rigid three-dimensional grid of the spandrels – at each end of each arch there are three lines parallel to the X-axis, thirteen parallel to the Y-axis, and six parallel to the Z-axis – plays off well against the curve of the big built-up arches. And as your angle of view moves relative to the bridge, the pattern of the lattice seems to change. I could stare at it for an embarrassingly long time, just like I can stare at the cables of the Brooklyn Bridge.
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