Happy 100th Birthday to the Queensboro Bridge!

“The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world” -Nick Carraway, The Great Gatsby

Completed in 1909 the Queensboro bridge doesn’t have the length of the Verrazano Narrows, the history of the Brooklyn Bridge, nor the traffic of the George Washington Bridge, But nontheless, the bridge perseveres despite its building marred by attempts to dynamite a span of the bridge and an ignominous windstorm. Its since been culturally memorialized in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Simon and Garfunkel, and Woody Allen. And more personally, I remember the bridge from the night I moved to New York City driving over the bridge in a taxi from Penn Station to Astoria, seeing the lights of Manhattan softly glowing in the distance with its “wild mystery” and the “promise” of beginning anew. 

So happy birthday Queensboro bridge, and even if you missed last night’s fireworks there are many centennial events in the upcoming weeks. And of course stay-tuned for the next New York City bridge centennial coming later this year: The Manhattan Bridge opened on December 31st, 1909…

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