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4. The Last of the Railroad Bridges
- Rutgers University Press
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N ews of all that bridge-building activity up at Albany and beyond certainly wasn’t lost on the cities and towns of the central and lower Hudson Valley, where populations and the commerce they generated were growing apace. One of those downstate cities was New York. By 1880 it would have a population of 1.7 million—up from 1 million only twenty years earlier and destined to double by 1900—and the city certainly didn’t need reports of new upstate bridges to be reminded that it needed to find better ways of getting across the river. Despite a continuing flow of new ideas, it still relied on ferries that were vulnerable to ice, wind, fog, and a whole variety of mechanical and human weaknesses. Nevertheless, it would be decades before a bridge would connect the big city with New Jersey. New York certainly wasn’t the only place in the lower Hudson Valley where people wanted and needed to cross the river or where they saw a new bridge as something that might enhance their prosperity. As early as 1841, when the Erie Railroad had begun laying track westward from the village of Piermont, on the west bank of the lower Hudson, there had been brief hopes of building a Hudson River railroad bridge there. Piermont was about thirty miles north of the center of things in New York, and nearby Tarrytown and Nyack were a couple of river towns that had already established themselves as the east and west ends of a good crossing place. But when the Erie failed to show any real interest in crossing the river there and then established its own ferry service from Piermont to Manhattan, any justification for a bridge near Piermont (if there had ever really been any) disappeared. It would be another 114 years before the Tappan Zee Bridge would be built there. 49 c hap ter 4 The Last of the Railroad Bridges Poughkeepsie and Castleton Not much farther up the Hudson, where the river begins to narrow and the distances between ferry crossings get a little longer, serious talk about building a bridge just north of Peekskill was beginning to be heard around 1868. The rich and well-connected upstate railroad figure Erastus Corning , together with a few of his influential colleagues, was convinced that a railroad could profitably be brought east to Peekskill from the coal fields of Pennsylvania, carried across the Hudson by bridge, and then continued east to the thriving cities and factories of New England.1 He established a corporation called the Hudson Highland Bridge Company, which assembled a panel of engineers to explore the subject of a bridge just north of Peekskill. It was a fairly capable group, headed by General George McClellan, but for the most part not the first tier of nineteenth-century engineering. McClellan had been seen as a promising young engineer when he graduated (second in his class) from West Point in 1846, but as a military leader during the Civil War he had disappointed President Abraham Lincoln and been sidelined. By the time the Hudson Highland project came along, a series of detours had taken their toll on his army career, and he was probably looking for a job. Horatio Allen, another well-established engineer on the panel, would within another few years succeed to the presidency of the prestigious American Society of Civil Engineers. He had for years concentrated on the design and construction of locomotives, but it’s doubtful that he had ever had much to do with bridges. Another former military oªcer, a Civil War general named Edward W. Serrell, was clearly the most promising civil engineer of the lot. He had concentrated on bridge design and related work for years before and during the war, and he became Hudson Highland’s chief engineer. The engineers apparently discharged their responsibilities well, approving the concept, encouraging the organizers to proceed, and identifying a workable crossing place between Fort Montgomery, an elevated site on the river’s west shore, and Anthony’s Nose, a correspondingly high place on its east shore that’s said (by some) to have been named for a local river captain whose big nose it resembled. The location lies a few miles north of Peekskill and approximately along the alignment of the later Bear Mountain Bridge, which would be built there in 1924. At the time they selected the site, the engineers made a recommendation that suggests...