The Alexander Hamilton Bridge is an eight-lane steel arch bridge that carries traffic over the Harlem River between the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx in New York City. The bridge connects the Trans-Manhattan Expressway in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan with the Cross Bronx Expressway as part of Interstate 95 and U.S. 1. The bridge opened to traffic on January 15, 1963, the same day that the Cross-Bronx Expressway was completed. For 2011, the New York City Department of Transportation, which operates and maintains the bridge, reported an average daily traffic (ADT) volume in both directions of 182,174, having reached a peak ADT of 192,848 in 1990.

Design

The total length of the bridge, including approaches, is 2,375 ft. Its parallel main spans are 555 ft long and provide 103 ft of vertical clearance over the Harlem River at the center and 366 ft of horizontal clearance. The bridge design included a set of spiraling ramps (officially known as the Highbridge Interchange and colloquially known as "The Corkscrew") to connect to and from the Major Deegan Expressway (completed in 1964) and a viaduct ramp connecting to the Harlem River Drive, both of which are over 100 ft below the level of the bridge, and access to Amsterdam Avenue.

History

After the George Washington Bridge, which connects Manhattan and New Jersey was completed in 1931, vehicles traveling between New Jersey and The Bronx would travel over the Washington Bridge, which crosses the Harlem River just north of the present Alexander Hamilton Bridge. The Alexander Hamilton Bridge was planned in the mid-1950s to connect Robert Moses' proposed Trans-Manhattan and Cross-Bronx Expressways and to accommodate the additional traffic resulting from the addition of the six-lane lower level to the George Washington Bridge. With the Interstate designation, 90% of the $21 million in construction costs were covered by the federal government. The bridge opened on January 15, 1963. Starting in 2009, the bridge underwent a full renovation at an estimated cost of $400 million. While the traffic jams created from the construction had not been as bad as local officials had anticipated, inbound delays at the Hudson River crossings increased after the project began. In July 2014, Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that the bridge renovation was complete.