I have always been fascinated by the massive masonry arches (that cover a steel framework) that pop up around town. Probably the greatest concentration is in Astoria, where a series of arches span side streets and carry Amtrak tracks on the Hell Gate Bridge approach. Others can be found supporting the Grand Concourse over East 175th Street in the Bronx.
The Manhattan Bridge has a set of masonry arches on both the Brooklyn and Manhattan ends. One spans Water Street at Pearl Street in DUMBO, and there’s this one, at Cherry and Pike Streets at the Lower East Side. The arch is tall enough to allow a full size lamppost to illuminate the underside of the arch.
City planners and developers haven’t been kind to Cherry Street, or any of its parallel streets on the Lower East Side. Named for a long-vanished cherry orchard, it once ran continuously from Pearl and Dover Streets to the East River at Corlears Hook, and when the U.S. Capitol was in NYC from 1785-1790, George Washington resided at a mansion at #3 Cherry Street. Today, the street has been cut back from Catherine to Montgomery Streets and a short piece from Jackson Street to the FDR Drive, with the Al Smith and Vladeck Houses occupying its former route.
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6/20/24
10 comments
Is there some sort of interior access? Those appear to be windows and maybe a door in the arch.
Would be a terrible office space at regular intervals, but maybe useful for storage or equipment?
One has to wonder what’s inside it! It can’t be a solid block of masonry and concrete, and there *are* windows near the top….
I suspect that it might indeed be a solid mass of masonry. I really don’t know for sure, but that structure that has the archway going through it is the cable anchorage and as such it requires a huge mass in order to fulfill its function of holding the ends of the cables that support the entire weight of the bridge and the traffic load.
Well, minus the part that is supported by the structures that are standing on the ground.
That said, I think these suspension bridge anchorages do have interior spaces. The late great Citizen Kafka, toward the end of his life, held a sale of things from his prodigious collection of stuff. I’m pretty sure the sale took place inside the Brooklyn Bridge anchorage. I seem to recall an article about this sale in the New York Times.
I did once answer a question on Travel Trivia, and it was found out that the Brooklyn Bridge did have a brewery in one of its anchorages at one time.
Whoa!!! The Captcha thing for that last post asked me to identify pictures of BRIDGES of all things!! I think that may have been a hello from the Citizen himself, from beyond the grave.
Shouldn’t be too much empty space there. That is mostly the anchorage for the main suspender cables. You can see the “ splay saddle “ in the photo just where the main cable enters the anchorage. From there the individual wires of the main cables are anchored to support rods deep in the masonry foundation.
The link “here’s another angle” leads to a view of Cooper Street in Camden NJ
Eh. I’ve had enough of google maps misdirections.