The Hell Gate Bridge of New York

The Hell Gate Bridge / Hell's Gate Bridge also known as the New York Connecting Railroad Bridge or the East River Arch Bridge was the longest steel arch bridge in the world when it was dedicated in March 1917. Built by the Pennsylvania Railroad between 1912 and 1917 for the purpose of connecting the Pennsylvania and New Haven railways, its 20,000 tons of steel spans 1,107 feet from the shore of Astoria to the Bronx's Ward Island.

Hell Gate Bridge by Dave Frieder (Image credit: Wikipedia)

The construction design is absolutely amazing. The "handle" of bridge rivets (or mechanical fasteners) is the thickness of the steel they are joined together. The rivets of the Hell's Gate Bridge happen to have the longest grip of any bridge in New York City: more than nine inches. Due to the high carbon steel it is made of, its span can last more than a thousand years.

Originally built for four tracks, the bridge currently carries two tracks of Amtrak's Northeast Corridor and one freight track across the Hell Gate, a strait of the East River, between Astoria in Queens, and Randalls and Wards Islands in Manhattan.

Eventhough Hell Gate Bridge has a quite ominous name it has no symbolic meaning and only describes the region of the East River in which the structure spans. Hell Gate is a narrow tidal strait which has deadly whirlpooling currents, located in the East River in between Queens and Ward’s Island at the center of a confluence of the New York Upper Bay, Long Island Sound, and the Hudson River (via the Harlem River).

Image credit: Gothamist

The strait derives its name from the Dutch word, Hellegat, which has two meanings: "Bright Gate" or "Hell Gate." The name was coined by Dutch fur trader and explorer, Adriaen Block in 1614 after he sailed his newly constructed forty-five foot, sixteen ton ship the Onrust (Dutch for “restless”) through the dangerous passage of water and into the Long Island Sound where he discovered Block Island.

The deadly current have claimed many live and made the location an ideal dumping ground for victims of the Mafia over the decades. An occasional skull or bone has been known to wash ashore…

This arch bridge also serve as design inspiration for the Sydney Harbour Bridge in Australia, the Tyne Bridge in England and the Bayonne Bridge, which connects Staten Island and New Jersey.

According to Gothamist, there were countless ghost stories and urban legends associated with the bridge in the 1970s, which included the neighborhood children seeing lights of phantom trains that never arrived. If a train did arrive, what followed was the disembarkation of the lost souls of the Spanish and Dutch explorers whose boats, as legend has it, sank in the turbulent currents directly below the bridge for which it was named after.

References:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_Gate_Bridge
• https://ltvsquad.com/2005/05/13/hell-gate-bridge/
• https://gothamist.com/news/the-strange-history-of-nycs-mighty-hell-gate
• https://untappedcities.com/2018/03/09/the-top-10-secrets-of-hell-gate-bridge-in-nyc/?displayall=true
• https://www.american-rails.com/hell-gate.html