THE Hell Gate Bridge was the final piece in the puzzle of running railroad trains into Midtown Manhattan. The tubes connecting Long Island with Penn Station opened in 1910, and Hell Gate Bridge, connecting Long Island with the mainland, opened in 1917 as the lengthiest steel arch bridge in the world until surpassed by the Bayonne Bridge in 1931. “Hellgat” means ‘beautiful strait” in Dutch, but lived up to its English transliteration as an extraordinarily dangerous stretch of water due to conflicting currents of the East River and Long Island Sound, as well as a great deal of rocks that made it treacherous for shipping until the rocks were dynamited into rubble in the late 19th Century. The construction was overseen by Gustav Lindenthal, who worked on the Williamsburg and Queensboro bridges as well. In the mid-1990s it was painted a deep maroon, which the sun has faded to light magenta.
I have always admired the step and repeat nature of the concrete arches that take the steel structure to and from the arch, located in Astoria and Ward’s Island, and also a feature of the Hell Gate that has always been little remarked upon: the massive arches that take the railroad over 29th, 31st, 33rd, 36th, 37th and 38th Streets. The railroad tracks are built on a massive, concrete-supported embankment in much of its route in Astoria, and a combination of iron trestles and concrete arches span the streets beneath. I have cited them often in Forgotten NY, but not for a few years. The one seen here is on 23rd Avenue and 33rd Street.
The concrete arches, of which there are several north and south of 23rd Avenue in Astoria, are all different with no two looking the same because the railroad trestle is on a gradual ascent/descent to and from the Hell Gate Bridge. Ultimately, plans call for Metro North trains to use the approach and bridge en route to several reopened stations in eastern Bronx; the date I’ve heard for this is 2027, but you can probably add 8 to ten years to that date. We’ll see.
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5/20/26