The Bridges of New York County Part 4 - Through the High Bridge

photo by Steve Duncan. www.undercity.org

There's more than one way to cross High Bridge. After the Aqueduct was abandoned for good, not much upkeep was done. Combined with a general disinvestment in the city, and especially in High Bridge Park, this led to the curious being able to make their way inside this old tunnel fairly easily. The abandoned part of the Aqueduct can be followed down the island of Manhattan from High Bridge until about 135th street. But that's another walk for another time.

If you enter in High Bridge Park in Manhattan and go the other way, you quickly get to the rusty iron tube that leads through the bridge. A gate chamber on either side makes for an interesting feature. The tube itself used to be inches thick iron - almost a century of neglect later you can see tiny dots of light from the holes and hear the rust crunch under your foot. It's thin enough to have a hole ripped out of it, allowing you to climb down a ladder and onto the catwalk underneath the main span.

From here you can go to the area seen above - the Bronx side being much longer than the Manhattan side, although bereft of the stubs of two original tubes you can see above (underneath the larger tube). All in all, this is one of the most historic and fascinating urban spaces in New York City. Until 2006 it was fairly simple to visit. That's when my buddy Steve decided to take New York Times Reporter Dan Barry to visit.

The New York City Department of Environmental Protection was already a little upset because of this article a bit before - upset enough to have the commissioner write a letter to the editor to the effect that people shouldn't be going into drains just for fun. So after the Times article we all got a nasty - but hardly unexpected - surprise when we found all entrances to the Aqueduct and High Bridge completely concreted up two days later. We learned a valuable lesson - always leave the authorities plausible deniability. A post or two on a random website or some photos on Flickr is very different from an article in the Paper of Record.

As of this post, the place is sealed up pretty good again. Still, I'd be surprised if I've had my last visit.