The G.W.B. doesn’t disappoint. It’s really big—the roadway is almost a mile long and is suspended more than 200 feet above the surface of the Hudson River—but it’s also digestible. Walking across it doesn’t take terribly long, and it’s actually a bit easier than the walk across the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridges, since the deck links a high point in New Jersey to a high point in Manhattan.
The day that I took this walk, the south sidewalk was closed, so I used the walkway on the north side of the bridge. The natural scenery up the river is just as magnificent as the man-made scenery downriver.
From the metro area that gives us such names as Hoboken, Weehawken, Hackensack*, Harsimus Cove and Throgs Neck, comes Yonkers, which sits across the city line from the Bronx. It’s visible from the bridge.
The Cloisters, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sits on the top of a hill in Fort Tryon Park at the very northern tip of Manhattan. Its tower pokes through the trees in this photo. Below it, just above the shoreline, is Robert Moses’s Henry Hudson Parkway. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, the construction of the Henry Hudson Parkway was where Moses went from arrogant-but-generally-good to essentially maniacal (but there were signs earlier, of course).
The views of Midtown are as good as ever, of course. The scale of the Empire State Building is, I think, best appreciated from this distance, where it still overpowers just about everything else.
As we cross over the Manhattan shoreline on the bridge, we can see railroad tracks below us. These were originally built by the New York Central to gain access to the West Side (its Grand Central Terminal is on the East Side). Now they’re owned by Amtrak, which uses them for trains to Albany and Chicago. These tracks and the environment around them in the early 20th century inspired Robert Moses to pursue public works in the first place. When he built Riverside Park and the Henry Hudson Parkway, the tracks were the source of much of his funding, part of which came directly from the New York Central and another chunk of which came from Federal funds earmarked for the elimination of railroad grade crossings.
Upon arriving in Manhattan, we’re greeted by the sight of the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal (in the foreground). Behind it are residential towers that are located directly on top of the Cross-Manhattan Expressway segment of I-95.
And now, a final view of the bridge.
The tour is over. The A train whisks me back downtown, and safely home to Park Slope.