BOW BRIDGE
(1885)
Hadley, New York
This bridge’s
setting is dramatic, high above the Sacandaga River in the southern Adirondacks
just north of Albany. Equally dramatic to scholars is its design, in which the
road is, quite unusually, situated at the middle of the lenticular (lensshaped)
truss instead of at the bottom. In 2002 it was awarded highly competitive
federal transportation enhancement funding of $1.2 million allocated by the New
York State Department of Transportation. Tom Ryan (a retired structural engineer
and artist who has painted many canvases depicting Bow Bridge), his colleagues
at the Ryan-Biggs engineering consulting firm, Adirondack Architectural
Heritage, the Preservation League of New York State, and the state’s Historic
Preservation Office all contributed to its preservation. The Bow String Bridge
went on the National Register of Historical Places in 1977. It's one of three
lenticular -- the word means lens-shaped -- truss bridges built in New York
state, and the only one that survives. One used to be in Homer, Cortland County,
and the other used to be on the Susquehanna River in the Binghamton area. It's
also the only such bridge in which the deck is placed in the middle of the
parabolic curves, she said.
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