Park Avenue Bridge (New York City) Park Avenue Bridge (New York City) The Park Avenue Bridge is a vertical lift bridge carrying the Metro-North Railroad across the Harlem River between the boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx in New York City. The average weekday ridership on Metro-North Railroad is 265,000. The first bridge on this site was constructed by the New York and Harlem Railroad in 1841. It was composed of four -long box truss spans, three of which were fixed iron spans, while the remaining span was a wooden swing span. In the closed position, the bridge had a clearance of only seven feet above
New York City dominated by Tammany Hall, a political machine supported by Irish and German immigrants. Several prominent American literary figures lived in New York during the 1830s and 1840s, including William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, John Keese, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Edgar Allan Poe. Public-minded members of the contemporaneous business elite lobbied for the establishment of Central Park, which in 1857 became the first landscaped park in an American city. The Great Irish Famine brought a large influx of Irish immigrants, of whom over 200,000 were living in New York by 1860, upwards of a quarter of