Uptown Greenway Bridge Repairs Enters Year 17 With No End in Sight

These bridge repairs are nearly old enough to vote!

The city still has no schedule to replace a small-but-crucial pedestrian and bike bridge on the Hudson River Greenway in northern Manhattan – 17 years after officials first launched the repair project.

The Fort Washington Park Bridge, spanning just 80 feet over Amtrak railroad tracks near W. 180th Street, provides a vital link on the nation’s busiest bike path. A Bloomberg-era redesign was supposed to replace the overpass’s rotting wood planks with steel and concrete.

Three mayors later, those plans have gone backwards — frustrating uptowners who have few other safe north-south routes to bike.

“That was supposed to be fixed before my daughter, who is is a senior in high achool, was born. It’s just crazy,” said Inwood resident and cycling advocate Allegra LeGrande.

The simple bridge replacement has slipped through the cracks of the city’s cross-agency bureaucracy while deteriorating to a point that threatens to shutter the connector.

The Department of Transportation took over the lead of the $5 million capital project from the Parks Department six years ago, and was poised to finally start work in 2023, but the agency blew past that deadline. Confusingly, DOT’s press office referred a recent request from Streetsblog for an update on the project back to Parks.

Three years later, the ramshackle overpass is falling apart again, just in time for the busy summer season:

Parks and DOT are planning “immediate” repairs to the planks, Parks spokesperson Kelsey Jean-Baptiste told Streetsblog after a reporter forwarded recent images of the disrepair.

Design for the full replacement is “underway,” Parks rep Jean-Baptiste added, saying that the city would publish a timeline when it “become[s] available,” noting that “responsibilities may shift” as a project moves from design to planning and construction.

The agencies tossed out the previous design that was originally supposed to be done by 2015 because it “presented significant challenges for construction,” Jean-Baptiste said. The Park Department’s public project tracker shows it at 0 percent complete.

For comparison, the 19th century Brooklyn Bridge took 14 years to construct.

The city has had to take the bridge out of commission in the past as its timber flooring dangerously decayed. And during its greenway repairs, the agency often sends cyclists onto dangerous detours through neighborhood streets without safe cycling infrastructure.

Greenways double as recreational and transportation corridors, but successive city administrations have treated them as little more than afterthoughts.

In northern Manhattan alone, Parks has had to close off several parts of the Hudson River greenway in recent years due to disrepair – sometimes sections several at the same time – including Cherry Walk and the section that runs alongside the Henry Hudson Parkway north of the George Washington Bridge.

Uptown ‘neglect’

The constant dysfunction of the city’s uptown greenways has prompted advocates with Transportation Alternatives to launch a campaign this month calling on the city invest the resources needed for lasting fixes, so the Hudson River Greenway is as good uptown as it is downtown, where the paths are among the best in the world.

“[It’s] the neglected little brother to the other portions of the greenway south of 96th,” said the group’s uptown and Bronx organizer Anna Berlanga, adding that some portions are downright “dangerous.”

Mayor Mamdani must make good on his promise to make government work for people by repairing the sections and provide actually offering safe reroutes during construction, Berlanga said.

The city should also take a look at connecting a nearby existing path to nowhere stretching south from Dyckman Street along the waterfront before looping back just north of 187th Street, and link it up to the waterfront path at the Little Red Lighthouse.

The problems stem from the city chronically underfunding its Parks agency, Berlanga said.

“We want to be partners with New York City Parks and we want to make sure they have the tools aka money to be able to deliver high quality service to the people uptown,” Berlanga told Streetsblog.

Mamdani recently earmarked $96 million for new greenway construction over five years, a drop in the bucket, but Hizzoner also needs to figure out how to speed up the projects (another greenway just wrapped up on Third Avenue after a stunning 14-year construction) and properly maintain existing legs of the network.

“I wish that Mamdani would go after whatever this broken process is with gusto,” LeGrande said.

Transportation Alternatives will launch its Fort Washington Greenway campaign on Friday, July 10 at 5:30 p.m., at the Little Red Lighthouse.