Standing high above the Hudson River, the George Washington Bridge is found at stands its eastern end and rests on the shores of Manhattan; and its western end is found in New Jersey’s wooded bluffs of the Palisades. Being twice as long as previous suspension bridges, it was and still is a wonder of beauty of its time. To many it will always be the greatest of all bridges past and present. It spans the river to connect New York City and New Jersey; it gave many challenged planners and engineers, like Othmar Ammann, who was the brilliant minded, Swiss-born architect and engineer that proposed his bridge design and vision in 1923 to make something extraordinary that had ultimately been chosen above any and all other designs and ideas.
The Plan behind the Design
The Port Authority Construction was set to begin in October of 1927, with Ammann as the new chief engineer. It was Ammann’s design, so bold and with great foresight, it was to be an extraordinary 3,500-foot center span that was to be suspended between two 570-foot steel towers and have the strength to carry two levels of roadway or rails. In his vision, the physical construction of this bridge was itself to be a marvel of engineering. Designing is so that the four main cables were each composed of a single strand to be carried back and forth across the river at a high travel count of 61 times. Ammann thought that each strand itself should be a bundle of 434 individual wires-wraps around a stranded shoe in the anchorage before looping back toward the opposite shore; giving it the strength it would need. Each shoe was designed to be connected to a bar sunk deep into the anchorage that would hold the strand in its place.
Construction Continued…
Prior to anything else being done both of towers were built first; once the two towers were put into place, the four main cables, all four measured a yard in diameter, were then strung up from shore to shore and up over the top of each of the towers. Next, steel suspenders were hung from the main cables, to support the roadway. Finally, came the time for the bridge men to construct the road and foot by foot, out from the shores they hung it from steel suspenders as they worked.
Tidbits about the Structure of the Bridge
Anchored to the New York anchorage, it consists of 110,000 cubic yards of concrete; it weighs approximately 260,000 tons. The main cables are tied into the rock of the Palisades in front of the Hudson River; at the time of its construction it required an excavation of 200,000 yards of solid rock. The George Washington Bridge first opened up to traffic in 1931, a year later during the first year of operation, in 1932 over 5.5 million vehicles used the original constructed six-lane roadway; as the demands of traffic grew, an additional construction was deemed necessary. In order to find an easy solution to the growing demand, the two center lanes on the bridge that had been left unpaved its original construction, were then finished and opened up to traffic in 1946; increasing its capacity by one-third. In later year, six lanes of roadway on the lower roadway of the bridge were completed in 1962.