History
After completion of the George Washington Bridge in 1931, traffic off that bridge into the Bronx would travel over the Washington Bridge, which crosses the Harlem River just north of the present Alexander Hamilton Bridge. The Alexander Hamilton Bridge was planned in the mid-1950s to connect to Robert Moses' proposed Trans-Manhattan and Cross-Bronx Expressways and to accommodate the additional traffic resulting from the addition of the six-lane lower level to the George Washington Bridge. With the Interstate designation, 90% of the $21 million in construction costs were covered by the federal government. The bridge design included a set of spiraling ramps (colloquially known as "The Corkscrew") to connect to and from the Major Deegan Expressway (completed in 1964) and a viaduct ramp connecting to the Harlem River Drive, both of which are over 100 feet (30 m) below the level of the Bridge, and access to Amsterdam Avenue.
The bridge is currently undergoing a full renovation which began in 2009 and is expected to continue through 2013. The construction is expected to cost $400 million. As of July 15, 2012, one of the eastbound lanes of the bridge has been closed to accommodate construction vehicles. While the traffic jams created from the construction have not been as bad as local officials have anticipated, inbound delays at the Hudson River crossings have increased since the project began.
Read more about this topic: Alexander Hamilton Bridge
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“No one can understand Paris and its history who does not understand that its fierceness is the balance and justification of its frivolity. It is called a city of pleasure; but it may also very specially be called a city of pain. The crown of roses is also a crown of thorns. Its people are too prone to hurt others, but quite ready also to hurt themselves. They are martyrs for religion, they are martyrs for irreligion; they are even martyrs for immorality.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)