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The End for the Tappan Zee Bridge Comes in Pieces, Not With a Boom - The New York Times

posted onDecember 26, 2017
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Article snippet: TARRYTOWN, N.Y. — The end is in sight for the old Tappan Zee. This now-haggard bridge, whose three-mile glide over the brisk, choppy waters of the Hudson River north of New York City thrilled children seeing the bridge for the first time in the mid 1950s, and at its peak did the brute work of carrying almost 140,000 cars a day, is growing thinner, shorter and more fragile. Having lost its reason for being when traffic was shifted to one of two cockily stylish twin replacement spans, its steel and concrete sections are being picked apart by crews of ironworkers and shipped off for use in other bridges and highways like kidneys and livers destined for organ transplants. It is no longer even a bridge, its two ends having been lopped off, leaving immense voids that extend from each bank of the Hudson. The fact that it is now stranded in the water openly declares that after 62 years the bridge’s time is up. The Tappan Zee is being supplanted by what has formally been christened the Gov. Mario M. Cuomo Bridge, named after the father of the current governor, Andrew M. Cuomo, who jump-started the long-delayed, $4 billion project in 2013. The first new span started carrying eight lanes of two-way traffic in October between Westchester and Rockland Counties. But traffic will be scaled down to four Rockland-bound lanes once the second Westchester-bound span is completed, which is supposed to occur in June. Both spans will then have wide shoulders to accommodate broken-down ... Link to the full article to read more

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