WORD comes that the two distinctive Belt Parkway pedestrian bridges that go over the parkway to the bike/pedestrian path along the Narrows are under demolition and will be replaced. I hope the replacements match the distinctive designs of the circa 1940 originals.
The Belt Parkway engineers built these gorgeous pedestrian bridges, four in number, at various locales along the Belt Parkway in Bay Ridge and Bensonhurst. There are two in Bay Ridge, at about 80th and 92nd Streets, and in Bensonhurst at the Bath Beach Playground (where 17th Avenue would be) and 27th Avenues. The bridges boast details like curved handrails found nowhere else in Department of Transportation engineering, and pedestrian bridges on other NYC Robert Moses parkways, such as the Cross Island Parkway, BQE or Long Island Expressway, are more…ah…pedestrian in appearance.
Two of these bridges also preserve the now very rare Type F lightpost, with reverse scrollwork (e.g. the little curl behind the post turns “up” in this design, while they were turned “down” in the lengthier long-arm NYC “Corvington” posts). There are just a handful of these left from the old days…one here, a couple on the 27th Avenue Belt Parkway ped bridge, West 13th Street between 6th and 7th Avenues, one in Ridgewood Gardens, Maspeth, Queens. They used to light side streets in Manhattan by the thousands. A new mold has been cut and retro-Type F posts have reappeared on streets like West 8th in the Village and Wyckoff Avenue in Bushwick.
Here is one of a pair of Type Fs complete with Westinghouse incandescent “cuplight” fixture but with a missing finial. Since these Type Fs are landmarked they must go back when the bridge has been replaced; hopefully the DOT can restore the missing finial. In the 1990s they were painted bright blue, which has faded in the 30 years since.
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4/5/23