History
The highway was originally planned as an open cut between 178th and 179th Streets, traversed by bridges carrying the major north–south avenues in upper Manhattan. The City of New York approved the creation of the highway in June 1957 as part of a joint effort with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that also called for the creation of the lower deck on the George Washington Bridge and construction of the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal above the cut for the Expressway.
The 12-lane Trans-Manhattan Expressway, with three lanes of traffic heading in each direction to and from each deck of the George Washington Bridge, opened to traffic in 1962 as part of a $60 million program to improve access roads for the George Washington Bridge, whose lower deck opened that same year. The Trans-Manhattan Expressway provides access to and from the Henry Hudson Parkway and Riverside Drive on the West Side of Manhattan, and to Amsterdam Avenue and the Harlem River Drive on the East Side.
The expressway was one of the first to use air rights over a major highway. After completion of the expressway, the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal and a series of four high-rise apartment buildings were built over the expressway. Local traffic reporters frequently refer to congestion "under the Apartments" during morning and evening rush hours.
On the east end at Amsterdam Avenue, portals to tunnels under 178th and 179th Streets (on each side of the expressway) still exist; the expressway replaced them.
Read more about this topic: Trans-Manhattan Expressway
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We are told that men protect us; that they are generous, even chivalric in their protection. Gentlemen, if your protectors were women, and they took all your property and your children, and paid you half as much for your work, though as well or better done than your own, would you think much of the chivalry which permitted you to sit in street-cars and picked up your pocket- handkerchief?”
—Mary B. Clay, U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 3, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902)