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B y the time vehicles first began to cross the Tappan Zee Bridge, in the winter of 1955, construction of another Hudson River bridge, seventy-five miles farther north, was well along. It would connect Kingston, New York State’s first capital, with the northwesterly corner of New York’s Dutchess County. It’s not surprising that the Kingston-Rhinecli¤ was one of the last of the river’s bridges to be built. It didn’t have the advantage of lying along the route of the New York State Thruway, as the Tappan Zee did, and in fact, it didn’t really have much in the way of other major highway connections to justify it either. There was a modest amount of industry in the area, but during the diªcult days of the Depression that certainly hadn’t been enough to convince the legislature that money should be spent there for a bridge. Depression conditions notwithstanding, the growing use of automobiles during the 1930s had increased the popularity of the Catskill Mountain resort area, which was easily reached through Kingston and Rhinecli¤, but wartime restrictions on the use of gasoline quickly reduced that travel. Once the war got underway, few if any projects not essential to its prosecution got much attention, and the idea of a bridge between Kingston and Rhinecli¤ languished. Of course, people in and near Kingston and Rhinecli¤ had been getting across the river by ferryboat for almost 250 years by then, and they had for the most part accepted its weaknesses along with its strengths. The evolution of that system, which was older than most, had pretty much followed the historical pattern of many of the Hudson’s other ferries, starting with a periauger, a small vessel that relied on a couple of hollowed-out logs for 196 c hap ter 12  The Kingston-Rhinecli¤ Bridge a hull and could be driven by either sail or oars. After a few years, horses walking on a treadmill turned paddlewheels. Some time around 1845, the owners of the local ferry company replaced their still primitive boats with a steam-driven vessel that carried many more passengers and wagons and substantially improved the ferry’s reliability by providing virtual independence of wind and tide. Those early ferryboats took passengers and freight back and forth between Rhinebeck on the east side of the river and Kingston Point and Rondout on the west side. Within about a dozen years of the introduction of steam power for the ferry, the construction of the Hudson River Railroad along the east bank of the river strengthened the ferries’ passenger base a bit, and issues like the location of their terminals and their scheduling began to be resolved. In 1851, just after the railroad had been completed all the way from New York to Albany, a Hudson River Railroad director named Charles Russell acquired a big tract of east bank riverfront land called Kipsbergen, near the village of Rhinebeck, subdivided it, and began an e¤ort to sell o¤ construction sites. He bought the ferry company, too, moved its dock to Kipsbergen, induced his fellow directors at the railroad to establish a station conveniently close to where the ferry landed, and named his emerging subdivision “Rhinecli¤.” Over the ninety or so years that elapsed between those events and the time when serious talk about a bridge to Kingston began to be heard, Rhinecli¤ and its neighbors in Rhinebeck prospered independently, but Rhinecli¤’s dominance as the transportation hub didn’t generate much enthusiasm in the surrounding communities. The Hudson River Railroad waited years before changing its timetable to show that its trains would stop at Rhinecli¤, not Rhinebeck, and the New York and Albany Day Line never changed its schedule.1 By the 1930s, the popularity of what the public had come to know simply as the Kingston-Rhinecli¤ Ferry was wearing a little thin. Its customers had long accepted its regular winter shutdowns and limitations on its hours of operation during the rest of the year as natural and unavoidable , and they were for the most part tolerant of the sometimes prolonged delays imposed by bad weather and mechanical failure. But between about 1930 and 1940, when even under the severely depressed conditions of the period the number of motor vehicle registrations in the country had increased by about six million, many people in the area had acquired cars of their own and had begun to think about how nice it would be...

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