By Jeffrey Page
No one ever accused New York of hurrying. For example, it took the state 35 years to do something with the ruins of the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge, which fell into disuse in a 1974 fire after about a century’s use.

From the charred remains, the state converted the bridge into an exquisitely situated path with a clumsy name: “The Walkway over the Hudson State Historic Park,” which no one can say three times fast.

I didn’t hurry either. It took me almost two years to finally visit the bridge, and what a pleasure. It connects Highland in the Town of Lloyd to the city of Poughkeepsie. When you get right down to it, the bridge is just a place to take a pleasant walk, but one that happens to be 212 feet over the surface of the great Hudson. And then you realize what might have happened. The span could have been ingloriously torn down and forgotten, or just left to rust itself into collapse.

But activists saved it. Once, the bridge carried a lot of trains. Now it carries a lot of baby carriages and people out for a walk. It’s a place of wonder. But first, a little history.

The crossing was a marvel of late 19th-century engineering and construction, an active rail span for 86 years through much of the 20th (carrying as many as 3,500 freight cars a day), a brooding hulk from the time of the fire to its opening in 2009 as a path for pedestrians.

Advocates of saving the burnt bridge and converting it to public use had a winning argument: Transforming it would cost about $38 million while tearing it down would cost about $50 million. Is there a politician or bureaucrat who can’t do such easy math – even in the state Legislature.?

The bridge is a 1.28-mile saunter. It is 24 feet wide, thus making it a curiously shaped state park of 3.7 long, very skinny acres. The guardrails are four and a half feet high.

The view is sensational. For a minute or an hour, turn your back on Poughkeepsie just downstream from the walkway. Face north and you get an idea of what the river looked like to the Mohawks and Iroquois who lived along it, and to Henry Hudson and the crew of the Half Moon as they sailed up to what is now Albany in 1609.

To the north, the Hudson is quiet, forested, unremittingly green and generally undeveloped. Upstream it bends slightly to the northwest through the northern Catskills and then disappears from view.

Another of the walkway’s attributes is its quiet. There’s nothing on the bridge that makes a mechanical sound except for the occasional passing of a police car. Just about all you hear are people’s voices, usually calling out to their children. You’re high enough that even when some people pass beneath the bridge on Jet Skis, you hear only a slight, distant stir.

There are plenty of people on the bridge – 750,000 since the official opening in late 2009 – but it never seems crowded. You hear snippets of conversation, an occasional dog bark, the far-off noise of a lawn mower as a guy cuts his lawn on the Highland side.

Forget the cop car. Forget the Jet Skis. On the bridge, people move in more primitive ways. They walk. They skate. They run. They bike. One guy even crosses on a unicycle. One little girl, about 4, gets off her bike to explain to her mother, on her own bike, how the brakes work. “OK, and now let’s go,” Mom says.

Logistics: I drove to Highland and parked in the walkway’s small lot. The fee is $5 for four hours, but free street parking is available as well. There are bathrooms, a food stand and an information tent on the Highland side, and bathrooms at the Poughkeepsie end.

I used to think the view of the Hudson from the walkway of the George Washington Bridge couldn’t be topped. Then I went to Highland.

Oh and by the way, the GWB shakes. Like a leaf in a storm.

Jeff can be reached at jeffrey@zestoforange.com

Tags: Jeffrey Page

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 11th, 2011 at 1:49 pm and is filed under Jeffrey Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.