Gossips has received the following news from Rob Perry, Superintendent of the Department of Public Works.
Demolition of the Ferry Street bridge is scheduled to begin next week, Monday, June 3, and continue for the next two weeks. This work involves the removal of the bridge deck and superstructure and will employ the use of large equipment as well as saws, torches, and cutters.
In order to minimize conflicts with passenger trains and provide the highest level of safety to railroad passengers, this work will be conducted during the night. Work will commence late in the evening and conclude in the early morning hours. Once all overhead risks have been removed, the project will resume operations during the daytime.
The pedestrian bridge will be closed this Friday, May 31, 2024. All pedestrians will be detoured to the Broad Street crossing for the duration of the project.
Projected completion date is late November/early December 2024.
This old timer will miss the bumpety, bumpety , bump of the old wooden deck.
ReplyDeleteI won't be the only one who is going to miss that defacto parking area!
ReplyDeleteGossips, can you remind us when this was supposed to have been completed just to put things in context?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure there ever was a hard "supposed to be done by" date, but I can review some history. In October 2014, the bridge, for safety reasons, was closed to vehicular traffic. In April 2016, Mayor Tiffany Martin announced that funding to replace the bridge had been secured, and the construction of the new bridge would be a project overseen by the NYS Department of Transportation. (That's important to remember because that means the schedule is dictated, and there is a whole lot of process involved.) In October 2018, Mayor Rick Rector held a public information meeting to introduce the preliminary designs for the new bridge. At that time, it was believed that the new bridge was just two years away. However, various delays and a global pandemic prevented that from happening.
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