More than five years ago, I wrote about the see-saw history of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge: built in 1939 with the slender profile that having only plate-girder stiffeners can give you, modified in 1943 with the addition of big stiffening trusses as a reaction to the collapse of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge, and then back to a slim profile in 2003 with the removal of trusses and the addition of wind fairings based on modern dynamic analysis.
My mental image of the bridge has the trusses because I saw it repeatedly in the 1970s, as it was our path to the Bronx and New England when my family was in a car. And my 2021 post has a HAER image of the bridge with the trusses. Courtesy of the Wurts Brothers, here it is as built:
The side girders are not as slender as Tacoma’s were, and the deck is wider (to carry a wider roadway for the heavier planned traffic capacity), but it was similar enough to scare people after the collapse out west, only a year after Whitestone opened. It’s an elegant profile, and one that the lead designer, Othmar Ammann, used a number of times with some variation.
One minor mistake: the New York Public Library webpage says “Date Created: 1964 (Approximate),” which is wrong. In 1964, the bridge had the side trusses. This photo has to be from between 1939 and 1943. My guess is that whoever cataloged this picture was misled by the bridge’s visual similarity to Ammann’s Verrazzano–Narrows Bridge, which opened in 1964. The Verrazzano got a second deck in 1969, which makes it and the Whitestone look less alike.
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