The Tappan Zee Bridge: Three Miles Across the Hudson

The bridge that spanned the Hudson here for sixty-two years was born from a particular kind of postwar American ambition, and it died from the same era's shortcuts.

When New York State planned the New York State Thruway in the late nineteen forties and early nineteen fifties, engineers needed to find a crossing point on the Hudson. The logical spot would have been the Narrows at the mouth of New York Harbor, but Robert Moses had claimed that location for what would become the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. The Thruway Authority pushed the crossing upstream to the wider, shallower stretch between Rockland and Westchester counties. The name came from the Tappan people who once lived on the western bank and from the Dutch word zee, meaning sea, since the tidal Hudson here behaves more like an estuary than a river.

Construction began in nineteen fifty-two and the bridge opened in December of nineteen fifty-five, at three miles long becoming the longest bridge in New York State. It was built cheaply, on a compressed timeline, using designs calibrated for the traffic volumes of nineteen fifty-five. No one adequately planned for what came next. By the late twentieth century, one hundred forty thousand vehicles a day were using a structure designed for a fraction of that load. The lanes were dangerously narrow. The roadbed was corroding. Maintenance costs grew every year.

New York announced plans to replace the bridge in the early two thousands. Construction of the new twin-span cable-stayed crossing began in twenty thirteen. The first span of what is now called the Governor Mario M. Cuomo Bridge opened in August of twenty seventeen, and the old Tappan Zee was retired and dismantled. The last remnant came down in twenty nineteen.

For sixty-two years it was the connector between the suburbs and the city, the bridge most New Yorkers meant when they said simply the bridge. Its replacement is wider, safer, and built to last. The view across the Hudson is the same.