Eastern Pier
Originally uploaded by epc

This is the eastern pier of the Manhattan Bridge. You don't hear or read too much about the Manhattan Bridge unless you live in NYC, it's the ugly step-sister (brother? what's the gender of a bridge?) of the Brooklyn Bridge which is maybe 1000 feet to the south.

Lately I've come around to marvelling at the Manhattan Bridge, it's elegant in its own way. It carries four subway lines on its four tracks (two inbound, two outbound). Its upper decks have two lanes of traffic in and outbound, and it has a middle lower deck which is reversed depending on the time of day.

It doesn't have the elegant cable pattern of the Brooklyn Bridge, and it's not quite as storied as the Williamsburgh bridge which is maybe a mile north.

Yet it's quite impressive. I think it's longer than the Brooklyn Bridge. It seems bulkier. It's in the midst of a 30 year upgrade project (in the late 1990s this included shutting down the subway lines over the bridge for a period of time. In retrospect it was not the brightest idea to place the subway tracks on the outside of the bridge, leading to interesting torquing problems).