Birth of Tribeca Bridge, February 1992

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A worker relaxes on the bridge before helping to connect the structure to its base on the Tribeca side of West Street. Photo: Carl Glassman

Workers check the positioning of the bridge as it rests on four trailers pulled by truck to Chambers Street. Photo: Carl Glassman

After being offloaded from a barge, the 250-foot-long Tribeca Bridge is slowly wheeled to Chambers Street, where it will be lifted by crane into position. Photo: Carl Glassman

The bridge rolls down West Street. Photo: Carl Glassman

Two cranes swing the bridge into position over the intersection of West and Chambers streets. The bridge aligned with a second-floor entrance to Stuyvesant High, at a 25-foot height that would allow large trucks to pass under it. Photo: Carl Glassman

In order to line up with the second-floor entrance to Stuyvesant High School, the bridge could not be positioned perpendicular to West Street, creating a more complex engineering challenge for the designers. Photo: Carl Glassman

Tribeca Bridge today, 23 years after it was installed. Photo: Carl Glassman/Tribeca Trib

It was 23 years ago this month that the prefabricated Tribeca Bridge arrived in the city by barge and was rolled, inch by inch, down West Street to its home on Chambers. There, it was craned into place, connecting the Tribeca side of the street, next to Borough of Manhattan Community College, to the newly built Stuyvesant High School and what then was the wasteland-like north end of Battery Park City.

That 250-foot pedestrian span would come with a hefty price tag. Utilities beneath the roadway, it turned out, prohibited a pylon support for the footbridge, raising the price of construction from $4 million to what, at the time, was said to be $10 million. In a recent interview with the Trib, David Emil, then the president of the Battery Park City Authority, the agency in charge of the project, said he recalled the final price to be closer to $14 million.

Handicap access requirements meant having a bridge to the school and an accessible way onto it. A ramp that would rise to the bridge’s 25-foot height was deemed impractical, so glass elevators were installed. They remained grounded for seven years, thanks to a dispute between the authority and the city over who should maintain them, and they have worked only sporadically since.

The cost of the bridge brought cries of elitism from some elected officials, with Queens Borough President Claire Shulman quoted as calling it a “Taj Mahal arrangement.” “She felt that Queens Boulevard was much more dangerous than the West Side Highway so why should Stuyvesant students be protected,” Emil recalled. “They should run across the street like everybody else does.”

The authority picked Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to design the bridge and, looking at it today, Emil said he is still pleased. “I think it stood up pretty well to the test of time.”

“But if I had it to do over again,” he added, “I might try to find a way to have a ramp.”