The Bridge Fitzgerald Called First Wild Promise

The novelist Fitzgerald sent his narrator across this very bridge to marvel at Manhattan. In The Great Gatsby, Nick Carraway rides over the Queensboro Bridge in Gatsby's car and describes the skyline rising beyond it, in Fitzgerald's words, as the city seen from the Queensboro Bridge, always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world. Fitzgerald wrote that line in nineteen twenty five, just sixteen years after the bridge you are crossing actually opened.

The Queensboro Bridge carried its first traffic in March of nineteen oh nine, with a formal opening ceremony that June. Its chief engineer, Gustav Lindenthal, built it as a double decked cantilever span, a style that does not need the tall towers and heavy cables of a suspension bridge. The upper level carried, and still carries, automobile traffic, while the lower level was built wide enough for four trolley tracks and a roadway, with elevated train tracks running alongside connecting into Manhattan's subway system. Those trolleys and trains ran for decades, the subway connection lasting until nineteen forty two and trolley service continuing until nineteen fifty seven.

The bridge's purpose went beyond moving people across the East River. By linking Manhattan directly to Long Island City, it opened what had largely been farmland and small industry in Queens to real estate development and new business, helping turn the borough into the dense, populated place it is today. Every car crossing this bridge now is still following the same path Lindenthal engineered, and the same path Fitzgerald's characters took into their own version of the city's promise.