Williamsburg Bridge
A Tinker Toy structure spanning New York's two chief hipster havens, the Lower East Side and Williamsburg, Brooklyn. When the bridge was built in 1903, only the glorious, comparatively gothic Brooklyn Bridge crossed the East River, and Williamsburg was a kind of luxury retreat for the city's wealthy, snobbier upper classes, protected from the teeming immigrant masses of Manhattan's sprawling Lower East Side by the hundreds of feet of water between them. With the construction of the bridge, the tenement neighborhoods of Manhattan gained a safety valve, and the bucolic Williamsburg community gained a whole bunch of ethnicity. Today, the bridge has a celebrated, well-maintained running and bike path and offers compelling vistas on either side.
Hundreds if not thousands of people walk across the Williamsburg Bridge ever day. That's how I get to work. However, during the 2005 New York City Transit Strike, all of Brooklyn found themselves joining me on my walk.
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