Ponquogue Bridge

New York

The bridge that used to cross Shinnecock Bay is still there, sitting under the new one as a fishing pier.

engineeringfishinghistorical

Under the concrete span at Hampton Bays, the old bridge is still standing. It was a wooden drawbridge, about a thousand feet long, put up in nineteen thirty. By the mid seventies its timbers were rotting. Suffolk County cut the weight limit from fifteen tons down to eight because the structure had been left to decay. When the replacement finally opened, the county pulled out the drawbridge span in the middle and simply left the approaches where they were. Fishermen took them over. In nineteen ninety-seven the old approaches were renovated for that purpose, and two years after that the county gave them an official name. They are a marine park now. Very little of the original nineteen thirty bridge actually survives in it, because the pier has been rebuilt again and again. The new span carries two lanes, runs more than twenty-eight hundred feet, and stands fifty-five feet above the water on twenty-nine spans.

This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.

What this was written from
The former Ponquogue Bridge currently serves as a fishing pier under the current span.

Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Nearby, on the same roads

  • Quogue Historic District 5.8 mi The widest street in Quogue was laid out that way because cattle were driven down it every spring.
  • The Watermill Center 8.7 mi A Western Union telecommunications lab on Long Island was gutted and turned into a theater laboratory where Lady Gaga once hung on the walls.
  • Long Island Central Pine Barrens 12.8 mi In 1978, RCA handed over seventy-two hundred acres of Long Island wilderness for one dollar.
  • Brookhaven National Laboratory 19.8 mi One of the world's first video games was built at a nuclear physics lab on Long Island in 1958.
  • Brookhaven, New York 22.7 mi One of the first video games ever made was designed at a nuclear research lab on Long Island.
  • Swan River (New York) 26.8 mi A stream barely fifteen feet wide holds one of only about six wild brook trout populations left on Long Island.