By Tony Richards
Editor in Chief

A banner on display near the Highbridge Park at 170th Street and Martin Luther King Avenue one Saturday in September provided a window into the desires of the surrounding community.

“What if the High Bridge was open again?” the top of the banner asked. Below, in magic marker, residents young and old had scrawled a variety of reasons why they wanted to see the bridge connecting the West Bronx and Manhattan’s Washington Heights reopened.

“It would be a great place to ask my wife to marry me again,” read one entry. “I could walk to grandma’s house,” read another. “I would play a bunch of games, like baseball, with my friends,” read a third.

Sentiments such as these are heartening to leaders of a movement to reopen the High Bridge, closed since 1960. And whether these dreams can become reality will become clearer later this fall, when the New York City Department of Transportation will release to the City Parks Department the findings of an exhaustive, multi-year study that includes examinations of the bridge’s steel supports, brick and stone, and Tie-Rods. The study, which cost $2.4 million, is also expected to provide an estimate of how much it will cost to reopen the bridge.

Meanwhile, High Bridge advocates helped to organize a street festival and health fair on September 16. Put together by Joseph Sanchez, Highbridge Parks Catalyst for the New York City Parks and Recreation Department’s Partnership for Parks, and Susan DeVito, associate director of Operations for Samaritan Village, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation facility near the High Bridge, the block party featured hip-hop and salsa music, basketball and jump-roping tournaments, and dance performances. The third annual celebration provided people in the community with a way to enjoy a late-summer day, but it was also aimed at spreading neighborhood awareness about efforts to reopen the bridge.

“It’s gonna take a lot of hard work,” said local resident Ariel Paredes, 14, as he enjoyed the festivities. “If everybody participates, we might have a strong chance.” Paredes said that if the bridge were reopened, it would allow him to walk across to Manhattan to visit his ailing father.

The 1450-foot-long High Bridge first opened in 1848, making it New York City’s oldest bridge. The prevalence of fires and disease in the 1800s motivated city planners to look for ways to infuse water into New York City; the bridge was built to connect the city with the Croton Aqueduct. The Highbridge Water tower was completed in 1870 to generate more water pressure. The bridge became a tourist attraction, and its walkway connected Highbridge Park on the Manhattan side with High Bridge park on the Bronx side.

Sanchez first became active in efforts to reopen the High Bridge in 2004. Since then, he has been passing out posters about the Bridge, organizing events such as the September 16 block party, and leading walking tours of the bridge and water tower.

“It’s reclaiming history,” Sanchez said. “It’s connecting the Bronx and Manhattan.” Sanchez said simply making local residents aware of the bridge’s history is one of the key steps to galvanizing support to reopen it.

One of Sanchez’ allies is Lourdes Hernández-Cordero, a staff associate with the Community Research Group of Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. In 2004, Hernández-Cordero took stewardship classes at the Inwood Hill Center in Manhattan. One of the sessions took her to the High Bridge terrace, where she helped to clean and prune.

“When I saw that bridge, I fell in love with it,” Hernández-Cordero said.

Hernández-Cordero said reopning the bridge would give the community a renewed sense of pride, not to mention an important sense of recreation: she imagines the parks on both sides of the bridge would become havens for cycling and rock climbing and envisions the parks might one day become part of an “urban hiking trail” that would connect the Northwest side of Central Park, St. Nicholas Park, Jackie Robinson Park, and the Highbridge Parks.

Sanchez and Hernández-Cordero also said reopening the bridge would boost the economies of both Washington Heights and the Bronx, allowing residents on one side to visit stores on the other, and added that improvement of the parks would reduce the violence, and theft that have often been associated with them since their abandonment.

Sanchez said his project had received considerable support from community leaders in both the Bronx and Manhattan, and that a key goal now was to get residents themselves involved. “The bridge is gonna re-open one day,” Sanchez said. “We might as well get everyone involved with it.”