They’re building bridges!
Brooklyn will celebrate the debut of the first of two spans that will replace the old Kosciuszko Bridge tonight, and the first brand-new bridge to grace the Brooklyn skyline since the Verrazano-Narrows connected Kings County to the Rock in 1964.
Drivers should expect traffic delays on both sides of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway throughout the day, as lanes are closed and traffic is directed away from the old bridge and onto the new one.
Come nightfall, Cuomo has rigged the bridge to radiate a massive, multi-color light show, which will be synchronized to a similar display on the Empire State Building and to music played on iHeartRadio stations.
Cuomo announced in February that the old Kosciuzsko, opened in 1939, would go out with a bang, with workers carting away the span’s center portion and then rigging the remaining structure with explosives in order to speed up work.
The demolition was originally set to roughly coincide with the opening of the new bridge, but, as of Thursday morning, the bridge’s fiery doom won’t happen until the summer according to a spokeswoman for state Department of Transportation.
Recently, a group of musicians calling themselves the Kosciuszko Philharmonic Orchestra created an online petition requesting the city let it perform Tchaikovsky’s famed “1812 Overture” during the span’s obliteration, although they remain short of their goal with only 237 out of 1,000 signatures.
Once the new span is open, six lanes will take traffic from Brooklyn to Queens and vice versa. Construction of a second cable-stay span with six lanes of traffic headed to Kings County, is in the works and is scheduled to open in 2020.
The Brooklyn Paper has been covering the plans to build the bridge since at least 2009, when the legendary Will Yakowicz wrote a piece headlined “The billion-dollar bridge.” What ever happened to that guy?
