After 9/11 the Rector Street pedestrian bridge was quickly commissioned to serve as safe passage over West Street between Battery Park City and the Financial District. The SHoP-designed bridge was supposed to last two years. It's still ticking! Plans to replace it with a new permanent West Street bridge located a bit to the south have been in the works for a while, and now the Broadsheet Daily reports the tentative design was unveiled yesterday at a Community Board 1 subcommittee meeting.
SHoP designed this one as well, and it's described as a "lenticular truss" structure, with "a graceful arc of winding chords that loop over, under, and around the deck." It would also be built off-site and hoisted into place to cut down on installation time. Spanning West Street diagonally, the bridge connects West Thames Street on the BPC side with the Battery Tunnel plaza on the east side. Already there's talk about changing the design (adding a covering to protect from bad weather, for example), but despite edits and the many approvals needed, the Battery Park City Authority is hopeful the new West Street bridge can be done by the spring of 2011.
· New West Street bridge plan unveiled [Broadsheet Daily]
Loading comments...