46 DECEMBER 17, 2020 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
Waxing romantic on the
BY THE OLD TIMER
OUR NEIGHBORHOOD: THE WAY IT WAS
EDITORIAL@RIDGEWOODTIMES.COM
@RIDGEWOODTIMES
If the Gowanus Canal can be considered
“Brooklyn’s nautical purgatory”
(as our sister publication,
The Brooklyn Paper, likes to call it),
then the Newtown Creek serves as
the aquatic abyss for two boroughs.
Running largely through an
industrial wasteland lined with factories,
oil tank farms and a sewage
treatment plant, the Newtown Creek
has been a commercial link for ships
around the world for nearly two centuries.
It is heavily polluted — the
EPA declared it a Superfund site
a decade ago — and it figures that
efforts to clean it up, while ongoing,
will take many years, if not decades,
to complete.
The Newtown Creek serves as the
dividing line between most of northern
Brooklyn and western Queens,
with four bridges spanning its polluted
waters to connect residents
and businesses on both sides. Over
the next three weeks, we will tell
you some of the history of these allimportant
bridges — including the
tales of spans that no longer exist.
Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives/Reprinted with permission
We’ll start this week near the
creek’s confluence with the East
River, at the point where the
tributary separates Hunters Point
in Long Island City with Greenpoint,
Brooklyn.
OUT WITH THE OLD … IN
1954
The main crossing there, since
1954, has been the Pulaski Bridge —
the burgundy-painted drawbridge
connecting 11th Street in Long Island
City with McGuinness Boulevard in
Greenpoint.
The span opened to traffic on Sept.
10, 1954. Just three hours later that
same day, about two blocks to the
west of the Pulaski Bridge, the city
closed the Vernon Avenue Bridge.
Within a few months, that span
— which stood more than 62 years —
was gone.
The Vernon Avenue span, once
upon a time, connected Greenpoint’s
Manhattan Avenue with Long Island
City’s Vernon Boulevard. It also runs
directly above the Greenpoint Tube,
the underground subway tunnel that
carries the G train between Brooklyn
and Queens — the only subway
crossing within the creek.
The bridge’s name reflected the
original name of Vernon Boulevard
from the days before Long Island
City became part of the city of New
York in 1898.
There had been a version of a
Vernon Avenue Bridge since 1882;
the first bridge — a span that swung
open on a 90-degree angle when a
ship needed to pass — was replaced
in 1905 after the city deemed it illequipped
to accommodate traffic in
the area.
The 1905 version of the Vernon
This photo shows a broken rail on the Vernon Avenue Bridge’s Queens side following an “accident” in
November 1935. Courtesy NYC Municipal Archives/Reprinted with permission
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