The Last Voyage of the Enterprise (and the Gil Hodges/Marine Parkway Bridge, Brooklyn-Rockaway, NY)

The Enterprise passes beneath the raised Gil Hodges Bridge

I really don't like driving in New York City. I'd already been the day before to test drive a new car in New Jersey, and it would take a lot to get me to go to NYC twice in the same weekend.

A space shuttle being floated past one of the most beautiful bridges in a city known for its beautiful bridges? Yah, I guess that would do it.

A crowd gathered at Bennett Field to watch the shuttle sail by

The Enterprise never flew in space. It was the prototype space shuttle, and was dropped from great heights to study its aerodynamics and tune the shape for the production shuttles that followed. A letter writing campaign convinced NASA to name the shuttle for the famous starship, and most of the original cast members made it to the space plane's dedication.

The shuttle with the 500mm lens

I'd plotted out just exactly where I was going to park and where I was going to watch the shuttle -- park at the ranger station near the airfield, watch the shuttle from the Gil Hodges Bridge. I figured that would give me a nice perspective, and I could get the sea level view when it passed the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge a couple hours later.

Well, traffic was awful. I was far from the only person to show up; the place was as crowded as a fireworks show, bemusing the fishermen who had set up poles on the beach, expecting to have the place to themselves. Not on shuttle season. Even the park rangers came to watch. Police and TV helicopters buzzed the shuttle on its slow journey into the bay.

Lots of people did watch from the bridge, but I elected to just sit on the beach and read a book, protected from the sun by an umbrella, until the shuttle showed. It was just a dot far in the distance, but I could see it clearly with the 500mm lens. I'd left my tripod in my car when it went into the shop. I had to use my Gorillapod mini-tripod grabbing onto my knee. Scrunched up on the beach, squinting into the camera on my knee, I took picture after picture as the shuttle approached.

Gil Hodges/Marine Parkway Bridge (sans shuttle)

The Gil Hodges Bridge, named for a famous baseball player with the Brooklyn Dodgers, connects Brooklyn with the Rockaways, a peninsula that juts out into the ocean. Brooklyn and Queens comprise the western tip of Long Island, which had me half wondering if it would be a good idea to just head through both boroughs to the Long Island Expressway and take the ferry across the sound to Bridgeport or New Haven. Rather than parking on the Van Wyck Expressway, which is what I ended up doing anyway.

When you leave Brooklyn, the sign says, "Fuggedaboudit!". Followed by a more sedate "Welcome to Queens", the more eastern borough clearly embarrassed by her brash husband (Brooklyn is in Kings County, Queens is in Queens County. Kings, Queens -- get it? Fuggedaboudit!).

If you'd like to visit the bridge, dammit, bring a bicycle. There were hundreds! The Flatbush bus stops right off the bridge, or you can park in the ranger's station down Aviation Road just before the bridge. I imagine, when there's no shuttles floating past, there's plenty of parking there. I didn't cross the bridge into Rockaway because it cost money and I didn't want to pay. Frickin' Bronx-Whitestone Bridge cost me $6.50 each way.

The Bridges of Portsmouth, NH

General Sullivan Bridge

I moved to New Hampshire's seacoast area when I started at the University of New Hampshire, and left five years later when I moved to California to start my career of always being at the hot technology companies just after they were no longer hot. These were the first five years of my adult life; I went to school, I fell in love, I got married, worked at a radio station and three startup tech companies (EZ Data, Enterprise Systems, and a third, the owner of which would prefer I don't talk about my time there on the Internet, as I found out the last time I did so).

Anyway, EZ Data was based out of Newington, and A... the unnamed company was based out of Portsmouth, and we lived in Dover, so every single day we would cross this beautiful old bridge, the Sullivan Bridge, our first bridge of the three in this post. Below the bridge was Hilton Park, where we could bring our lunches and watch the boats sailing on Little Bay.

After we left for California, they closed the bridge, which was used for southbound traffic when we lived there, and it is now used only for pedestrian traffic. The state is now deciding whether to renovate it for traffic, just tear it down, or replace all the bridges with a super-wide bridge. These bridges are the bottleneck for traffic from the Portsmouth area to the 'burbs to the north.

I'm hoping for restoration for traffic, of course. Though it would be hideously expensive, it is the second most historic bridge in the area.

Well, that was before Portsmouth decommissioned the first most historic bridge, the Memorial Bridge.

Sarah Mildred Long Bridge

The Sarah Mildred Long Bridge is more commonly known as "the middle bridge". It connects the city of Portsmouth with Kittery, Maine, home of a naval base and the Kittery Trading Post. It is one of two drawbridges across the Piscataqua River, and with the decommissioning of the Memorial Bridge, the only one that remains.

The bascule (the moving bit) lifts every fifteen minutes during the day to allow traffic through, but this bridge has a secret. Automobile and truck traffic runs along the top, but there is a train track that runs along the bottom. If a boat comes by that could get by if the train track section just weren't there, the bridge master can slide the bottom part to the side.

The Memorial Bridge looks similar to the Long Bridge, but with curvier trusses on either side of the bascule. I'd have pictures of it, but A) they re-arranged the Portsmouth traffic so much that I couldn't find it, and B) I thought this WAS the Memorial Bridge. Which shows how memory fades after a quarter century away. Anyway, C) they decommissioned it.

I'll get it next time, what's left of it.

Piscataqua River Bridge

The Piscataqua River Bridge rises dramatically high above the Portsmouth skyline. Like the Memorial Bridge and the Long Bridge, the Piscataqua River Bridge crosses the (wait for it) Piscataqua River and connects the city with Kittery, Maine, bringing a northern cap to New Hampshire's colorful and historic eleven miles of coast.

Out of all the cities I have lived or worked in, Portsmouth was the most beautiful. Watching a live performance of "Grease" on the lawn on Strawberry Bank, staggering drunkenly through snow shrouded city streets singing sea shanties after a memorable meal at The Library, geeking out with plastic baggy video games at the Atari Computer Club, lining up outside the Jerry Lewis Cinema to see The Empire Strikes Back... it's a painfully breathtaking example of a New England seacoast town.

Pelham Bay/Shore Road Bridge, Bronx, NY

Pelham Bay Bridge

It's still catch-up week here at Life, On a Bridged. This weekend is going to be a post about three beautiful bridges in the Portsmouth, NH area, and next week is going to be Covered Bridge Week. (Preview: we cover the most haunted bridge in the Berkshires!)

But for now, we're in the Bronx, at the Pelham Bay/Shore Road Bridge.

Usually when I visit the Bronx, I go by train. It's convenient, comfortable and even fun. Once in the city, the subway and buses bring me anywhere I need to go. This is how things were for years, until I got a car. While following the Merritt Parkway into New York, I came for the first time to NYC in a car. And that made all the difference. Unlike traveling in a train, in a car I could get lost. And while lost, I could find things.

I'd hoped to get a NYC bridge while I was in the area before heading back home to Connecticut (and I did, the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge). On the way to that bridge, I passed over this bridge. I immediately turned around, parked at the Bronx Equestrian Center, and looked for someplace with a good view of the bridge.

I didn't have to go far; there is a trail off of City Island Road (which has some pretty cool bike paths) which goes right up to the mouth of the Hutchinson River, over which the bridge runs.

The bridge is one of the busiest drawbridges in the city, second only to the Hamilton Avenue Bridge in Brooklyn. (Reading that report, btw, I bet I could spend a year, easy, just photographing New York City's historic bridges). It was completed in 1909, replacing a wooden bridge that crossed the river nearby, and celebrated its centennial a couple years back.

It's not a long bridge, but you can walk over it and enjoy both halves of the Pelham Bay Park (and landfill!). Say what you like about NYC, they have amazing parks. This trip I visited the Pelham Bay Park and the Ferry Point Park and was impressed by them both.

The Bridges of Bridgeport: Congress Street Bridge, et al

With a city named "Bridgeport", how could a bridge hunter go wrong? It was the Congress Street Bridge that made the list of historical bridges -- you can see it blurrily in the background there -- but the city is known for its large number of bridges.

Well, the Congress Street Bridge is closed. The movable bit -- the bascule -- is removed, and the bridge is all blocked off.

Here's a picture of the other side of the Congress Street Bridge. It's a nice enough bridge. It was frozen in the upright position, and I was hoping to get a shot of that. But they were gone, and what's left is nothing worth a trip.

Turning to the other direction is a nice lift bridge. It carries the Amtrak tracks over the Pequonnock River.

There's another lift bridge around the bend in the river that carries pedestrian and auto traffic across the river, and finally, the biggest bridge of all...

The I-95 bridge over the river. It continues south along the coast to New York City, and east toward the mouths of the Housatonic, Quinnipiac, Connecticut and Mystic rivers -- each of which bear prettier bridges.

Washington Bridge, Stratford-Milford, CT

Washington Bridge

I was thinking this weekend I wouldn't go bridge hunting, but come Thursday I was already sketching out plans to start photographing some of the many bridges in Fairfield County. Fairfield County is pretty much New York City's sixth borough, and as such is the perfect run-up to my Manhattan trip sometime this spring.

I started the morning heading down Route 15 to Bridgeport. Route 15 had a lot of amazing bridges crossing it, but I had no place to stop so they went unphotographed. Next time, I'll set up something so I can set my phone on the dash and it can automatically snap pictures and get these bridges uploaded.

Bridgeport was supposed to be a gimme; its name is Bridgeport! And there were bridges, and I'll eventually post them here, but they weren't something to get really excited about. I took my pictures and headed to Stratford to see the end of the Housatonic River as it empties into Long Island Sound. I was rewarded with an absolutely incredible bridge, the Washington Bridge, a six span open spandrel arch bridge with a two leaf bascule -- drawbridge -- in the middle.

I've been up in the north part of the state, where the Housatonic flows fast and free beneath the West Cornwall Covered Bridge and to a lot of the bridges that cross it along the way. Dammed three times, it is slow and wide here.

The bridge is easy to get to; take exit 44 off Route 95 and head straight along Ferry Boulevard to the shopping center at the end. There's a private marina there, and a small park with a public wharf that goes aways into the river. You can cross beneath the bridge and find wooden paths down to some public piers which give a great view of the bridge (such as the one that heads this post). The bridge has sidewalks crossing it on both sides; the south side gives grand views of the river delta, the north side looks down on the marina and over to the Route 95 river crossing and railroad bridge. The railroad bridge might be a swing bridge, but I think it might be a lift bridge. It was hard to tell from where I was, but the giant towers over it suggest to me that it is a lift bridge.

I-95 river crossing