Forgotten New York

LEFFERTS BOULEVARD BRIDGE, Kew Gardens

From the archives, here’s a winter view of the Lefferts Boulevard Bridge spanning the Long Island Rail Road, one of the more unusual bridges in Queens. Why, you ask?

It’s lined on both sides with commercial buildings. A complicated engineering solution encompasses three separate bridges on Lefferts: one for the roadway, and two on each side that support the buildings. According to Kew Gardens: Urban Village in the Big City author and PBS-TV host Barry Lewis, the store’s bridges actually run through the buildings’ roofs, with the storefronts hung from the bridges like a curtain on a rod. The engineering principle is similar to that of the circa-1565 Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) in Florence, Italy. The Lefferts Blvd. bridge had assumed its present condition by 1930.

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7/27/17

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