 Badly rusting and showing signs of being
overtaken by nature if allowed, this original issue 1950s era
walkbridge at Cloverdale Boulevard may soon lose out instead
to that greatest scourge of all New York expressway fixtures;
reconstruction.On both sides, the bridge is inundated with construction material, and though still working for the most part, half of the remaining 1950s era Westinghouse AK15 "cuplight" luminaires, still housing incandescent bulbs, are missing their diffuser bowls. They have sadly disappeared from virtually all other nearby walkbridges on the LIE and Clearview Expressway, where they had been the last holdouts of their kind within New York City, save for some forgotten or unreachable incandescent and mercury vapor cousins embedded or hung beneath scattered overpasses. |
 Most of my assumptions of this work are pure conjecture.
The wall under construction just east of the bridge above, along
the eastbound expressway lanes, might be a sound barrier wall
to protect the neighborhood to its south, but I believe it to
be the southern anchorage for a replacement walkbridge.To the left, the slope separating the westbound lanes and the service road is being cleared, and I assume another anchorage will soon take root there. It's incredible what you suddenly notice only when it starts to disappear. In the photos above, note the guardrails lining the walkbridge. Forgetting the ubiquitous cyclone fencing, put up to help dissuade lunatics from lobbing either themselves or other projectiles onto motorists below, look closely at the shorter fences usurped by the cyclones on the center span. Don't they resemble the railings popular on the terraces of many 1950s-60s era apartment houses; the architectural era, of course, that spawned this bridge. What may have seemed merely functional and bland back then, in a modern sort of way, are now highly endangered species of period design, about to be bulldozed for today's ultra modernistic ideas. |
 Another day settles and sun sets on the
doomed Cloverdale walkbridge and its condemned classic lampposts.
The shiny, sleek SLECO "Bigloop" poles that shunted
aside their less colorful eliptical armed predecessors in the
mid 1960s, may not live any longer than the bridge and its illuminati.For the most part, they have already disappeared from the LIE east of East Hampton Boulevard a couple of blocks to the east, where massive reconstruction has ripped the highway apart. All shot on June 9th, 2001. |
© 2001, Jeff Saltzman. All rights reserved.
