New City Island Bridge: A Clam Digger’s Perspective On The Issues

The following is a guest post by City Island native, Tom Smith, and City Island Civic Association member.

 

I am a second generation City Islander, born a Clam Digger in 1957. My late father also grew up on City Island. I own and live in the house on City Island that my father built with his own hands. There is no one who has more emotional and nostalgic attachment to the current City Island Bridge than I. When I was a child, before the turntable function of the bridge was permanently disabled and the bridge gratings paved over, the humming of cars and trucks passing over those gratings carried down the length of City Island and, on hot summer nights, with my bedroom window open, that comforting sound would lull me to sleep. My parents often reminisced about how my siblings and I would, having fallen asleep in the car during a long drive home from some far-flung vacation, jump up at the sound of our tires passing over the bridge grating and sing out “We home!” My father liked to tell the story of when I was a baby and spoke my very first words. As he related, we were driving over the City Island Bridge with the sound of our tires humming over the gratings when I perked up, looked out the car window at the boats in Eastchester Bay, and exclaimed “water boats!” My first word was really two words, and not mama or dada, but “water boats.” City Island and the City Island Bridge are part of my DNA.

It is because the City Island Bridge is part of the fabric of my life that I was truly dismayed to learn, about fourteen years ago, that the city planned to replace the bridge. As someone active in my community and involved with the City Island Civic Association for twenty five years, I attended meetings and spoke up about my opposition to replacing the bridge. The Civic Association formed a bridge committee back then and tried to convince the city to refurbish the existing bridge. City officials steadfastly refused, insisting that it was impractical and not cost effective. We then asked for a replica bridge. Again we were shot down. When we were told in no uncertain terms, and directly by then-mayor Bloomberg, that we were getting a cable-stayed bridge whether we liked it or not, the Civic Assn Bridge Committee did its best to negotiate a redesign of that bridge, obtaining concessions on dramatically lowering the height and changing other design features. The city accommodated us even though it was not required to. It may come as news to some individuals who have involved themselves only very recently in the bridge issue, but the people do not vote on bridge and highway projects. To think they do is quite amateurish. The best the community can do is lobby and plead with city bureaucrats. Even our elected officials on the city and state levels who were opposed to the cable-stayed bridge could not persuade the mayor to give up the cable-stayed design. So our best hope was to delay the start of construction until Mayor Bloomberg left office so we could then plead with a new administration to come up with a new design. The Civic Assn did so by filing a lawsuit.

When we obtained an eleventh-hour injunction to delay construction of the bridge, the cable-stayed bridge design had been approved by the city, a construction contract had been awarded, and the contractor was beginning preliminary work. Hope of having the design of the bridge changed was fading fast. It is important to note that the injunction against beginning construction had nothing to do with the bridge design, it only had to do with forcing the city to abide by the required ULURP (Uniform Land Use Review Procedure), necessary because use of park land was involved. The design of the bridge was irrelevant to the courts. We were just stalling, hoping to convince the new city administration to review the project and abandon the cable-stayed design. To our joyful amazement, that’s exactly what happened. The city agreed to abandon the cable-stayed bridge and give us what throngs of residents at fourteen years of meetings had asked for – a simple, low-rise bridge.

When the city agreed to change the design, it had a matter of weeks to come up with the new design because they were facing certain federal government deadlines. Some of the many residents involved with protesting the cable-stayed bridge began to talk about negotiating certain aspects of the new, simpler bridge design, but calmer, more mature heads prevailed. Imagine if a large number of residents began clamoring for their own pet design features. Consensus would never be reached and we would have a monstrous cable-stayed bridge built while individuals were still arguing about what should be built in its stead. So it was agreed by those who were actually involved in the process that what we wanted was anything but the cable-stayed design. Neither the community nor its organizations had a vote or veto with regard to what the design would be. Our choice was to accept the causeway bridge that several hundred vocal residents have been clamoring for during the last decade, or let the city go ahead with building the cable-stayed bridge. If you were to survey the island residents and ask which of the two options they prefer, cable-stayed or causeway, you will find that the vast majority prefer the causeway design. That was made abundantly clear during many meetings, rallies, protests and demonstrations during the last fourteen years.

The majority of the residents of City Island are ecstatic that we will not have the Godzilla Bridge, as it came to be known, foisted upon us. We now get to work with the NYC Department of Transportation to help design the aesthetic, decorative features of the new causeway bridge so that it will have a character unique to City Island. The people of City Island and the rest of the Bronx have the City Island Civic Association and the City Island Chamber of Commerce to thank for that.

Tom Smith
Clam Digger

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