Bargain!

I found an opportunity to honor Gramps memory and for this price I think we could get Ginsberg on board;



UP FOR GRABS
WANNA BUY A BRIDGE?
by Alec Wilkinson
Issue of 2006-01-16
Posted 2006-01-09

The Willis Avenue Bridge. New York City is selling the Willis Avenue Bridge. For a dollar. First New York City bridge ever offered for sale, far as anyone knows, and I wouldn’t advise holding your breath for the next one. The kicker? Delivery anywhere within fifteen miles of its present site, at 125th Street and the Harlem River, is free. Comes in sections on a barge. I’m thinking this bridge might make a terrific approach to your island. Think how 6,213 tons of steel and 29,546 cubic yards of masonry would look in Penobscot Bay. Is that a statement, or what?

I know you’re probably thinking, What’s wrong with the bridge that the city’s selling it? Nothing, they’re just replacing it, starting in 2007. According to Iris Weinshall, the commissioner of the city’s Department of Transportation, the city usually dismantles a property like this one, “decomposes” it, she says, but since some of the funds for the new bridge are coming from the federal and state governments, the city’s required to try and find a new use for it. It’s old—it opened in 1901—and it needs some attention, but it handles so much traffic that the city can’t shut it down to repair it. The new Willis Avenue Bridge, by the way, will occupy space beside the old one. It’s the first time the city is building what the Commissioner calls an “in kind” bridge.

Commissioner Weinshall says she hasn’t got any calls on the bridge yet, but I doubt it’ll last, not in this market. She thinks any civilian interested might be up against someone in the federal highway department who has a bridge to put up and thinks, Why pay for a new bridge? Why not install this historic one?

I’ll mention the one stipulation the Commissioner imposed and then I’ll hang up: if you purchase the bridge and take it past the fifteen miles, it’s yours. “No bringing it back,” she says. “We don’t want people knocking on our door in a couple of years saying, ‘We tried it. It didn’t work.’ ”

Let me know if you want pictures. Buh-bye.