The Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. (Photo: Andrew Moore)
The Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge celebrated its 70th birthday today. The bridge connects the Rockaway Peninsula in Queens with Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn.
The bridge was designed by Aymar Embury II, who was also the architect of the Triborough and Bronx-Whitestone Bridges. In 1938, the bridge’s first full year of operation, 1.9 million vehicles crossed the bridge; in 2006, 7.8 million did. The vertical lift was raised 157 times in 2006 to allow vessels to pass through the Rockaway Inlet.
Both ends of the bridge today are within the Gateway National Recreation Area, part of the national parks system. Bridge traffic surges by 50 percent during the summer. In 1978, the bridge was named for Gil Hodges in honor of the Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman and Mets manager.
Mr. Hodges’s widow, Joan, and son Gil Hodges Jr. rode in a motorcade of vintage cars (from the 1930s and 1940s) from Floyd Bennett Field over the bridge to the recently restored bathhouse in Jacob Riis Park, following the original path of the opening motorcade. They were joined by Elliot G. Sander, executive director and chief executive of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and David Moretti, acting president of M.T.A. Bridges and Tunnels.
When it opened, the bridge had the longest vertical lift span in the world; it is still the longest vertical lift span for vehicular traffic in North America. The Marine Parkway Authority, which built the bridge, became part of the Triborough Bridge Authority in 1940, falling under the control of the region’s master builder, Robert Moses. (That entity, in turn, became part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority in 1968.)
The M.T.A. offered this historical tidbit in a news release:
The morning of July 3, 1937, marked the grand opening of the new Marine Parkway Memorial Bridge. With the sun shining and the N.Y.P.D. Police Band ready to play, Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia, Robert Moses, head of the Marine Parkway Authority and city Parks Commissioner and other officials, were getting ready to embark in a 500-car motorcade to christen the bridge.
There was excitement in the air as the band tuned up from its designated place on the bridge’s elevated lift span and invited guests got into cars on the Brooklyn side of the bridge along Flatbush Avenue for the inaugural ride across the span.
But the first vehicle to cross the bridge did not belong to the mayor or master builder Robert Moses, who helped make the bridge a reality. About 15 minutes before the ceremonies were scheduled to start, the first vehicles to cross the span were three engine companies from Brooklyn; summoned to help put out a five-alarm fire that destroyed two blocks of wooden concession stands along the Rockaway Beach Boardwalk.
Even before its official opening, the bridge proved it was an asset to the community. Mayor La Guardia pointed out that if the bridge wasn’t there, it would have taken the Brooklyn fire companies precious minutes to travel to the old Cross Bay Bridge, four miles to the east.
The Police Band, which scrambled off the lowered lift before the fire trucks screamed across the bridge, resumed their post and the ceremony went on as planned. A gun salute from nearby Fort Tilden announced the beginning of the event, which included a fireboat pumping streams of water into the air and a flyover by nine Martin bomber planes from nearby Mitchel Field.
Today, during the anniversary celebration, a Rockaway Point Volunteer Fire Department truck led the motorcade, the authority said, “in a nod to history.”
