History
The first sprawling trestle crossing from West Islip to Captree Island was completed in 1951. The structure is 3,206.2 metres (2.0 mi) in length with a middle clearance for boats of 18.2 metres (59.7 ft). Originally, one lane was for southbound traffic and the other for northbound traffic. In 1967, a new span was built next to the original bridge, carrying three lanes of northbound traffic. The original bridge was reconfigured to carry southbound traffic.
The Fire Island Inlet span was completed in 1964 and by 1985 a dual span was supposed to be built in order to alleviate traffic, but it was never done. When first proposed in 1938, the span was to be a vertical-lift span with a design similar to that of the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. Later, the design of the Fire Island Bridge was changed to conform with that of the Great South Bay span, a 600-foot (180 m) steel-arch span with a 60-foot (18 m) clearance.
Read more about this topic: Robert Moses Causeway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes.”
—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas De Chamfort (1741–1794)
“What you don’t understand is that it is possible to be an atheist, it is possible not to know if God exists or why He should, and yet to believe that man does not live in a state of nature but in history, and that history as we know it now began with Christ, it was founded by Him on the Gospels.”
—Boris Pasternak (1890–1960)