April 19–25, 2019 Brooklyn Paper • www.BrooklynPaper.com • (718) 260-2500 AWP 3
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Steely span
Park unveils plans for yet
another Squibb Bridge
By Kevin Duggan
Brooklyn Paper
Brooklyn Bridge Park bigwigs
presented renderings of
their multi-million-dollar plan
to tear down and rebuild the
beleaguered Squibb Bridge
at a community meeting on
Monday.
The new bridge — which
zig-zags from its namesake
park in Brooklyn Heights
down to the waterfront
park below — will look almost
identical to the current
structure, but the semi-private
Brooklyn Bridge Park
Corporation, which oversees
the green space, will
replace the rotting wood elements
with prefabricated
steel, giving it a longer
shelf life, according to the
organization’s president.
“We’ve had multiple issues
with this bridge, and
we felt that going to a prefabricated
steel would allow
us to have certainty about the
life of the bridge,” Eric Landau
told Community Board
2’s Parks and Recreation
Committee.
Manhattan-based firm
Turner Construction will
start taking down the current
structure some time around
October and aim to finish
the project by the summer
of 2020 in keeping with the
plans Landau announced in
December, he said.
The project’s engineers,
the Arup Group, completed
the bridge’s first repair after
it closed in 2014.
The concrete support structures
coming out of, but wood
coming out of them will also
be replaced with steel.
The revamp comes at a $6.5
million price tag for the 450-
foot pathway — or roughly
$1,200 per inch — which is
$2.5 million more expensive
than retrofitting the current
structure.
But maintaining the existing
bridge would cost
more in the long run than
the additional upfront costs,
according to Landau.
“After a certain number of
years, the $2.5 million that we
saved in retrofitting versus replacing,
we would spend that
and more in ongoing annual
maintenance of the bridge,”
he said.
The cash to rebuild the project
will come from funds generated
by development projects
and concession sales in
the green space, according
to Landau.
The reconstruction project
of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway,
which stretches 1.5
miles between Atlantic Avenue
and Sands Street, and
The new Squibb Bridg will look much like its current
iteration but will have a structure made of steel
instead of wood.
Arup
cuts beneath the stretch of
Columbia Heights where locals
currently enter Middagh
Street’s Squibb Park, will not
affect the bridge’s construction,
but might have an impact
on the Heights green space,
depending on which plan the
city chooses for the crumbling
roadway, Landau said.
“I think it’s fair to say that
all of the plans at some level
have an impact to the park —
not necessarily to this bridge,
but to the park — and it’s hard
for us to fully judge what those
impacts are because some of
those plans haven’t been fully
vetted or fully engineered
yet,” he said.
The future construction of
a long-awaited pool in that
park will also not interfere
with the bridge project, but
the walkway will have to be
accessible without having to
go through the bath, as per the
city’s regulations on entrances
and exits to swimming spots,
Landau said.
State Sen. Brian Kavanagh
(D–Brooklyn Heights) previously
said that the pool would
be open by 2020, the same
year the bridge is slated to
be operational.
Landau stopped short of
guaranteeing that the two
won’t overlap because his
corporation has yet to issue
a final design and collect all
the funds for the bath.
Buttigieg speaks in Williamburg
By Zach Gewelb
Brooklyn Paper
A presidential candidate
spoke at a packed house at a
fund-raising event at Brooklyn
Bowl in Williamsburg on
Monday night.
Pete Buttigieg , who has
been the mayor of South Bend,
Ind., for nearly eight years,
made the trip to Brooklyn after
he announced his presidential
campaign on Sunday.
“My name is Pete Buttigieg.
They call me Mayor
Pete. I am a proud son of
South Bend, Indiana. And I
am running for President of
the United States,” he said
to thunderous applause at
the April 14 announcement
in South Bend.
The Democrat would be
the first openly gay president
if elected, and at 37
years old, the youngest, too.
The minimum age to run for
president is 35.
Buttigieg was first elected
mayor of South Bend — where
he grew up —in 2011 when
he was 29 years old and was
re-elected in 2015 with 80
percent of the vote.
He is a graduate of Harvard
University. He served as a lieutenant
in the Afghanistan War
and earned the Joint Service
Commendation Medal for his
counterterrorism work.
He worked on the 2004
Kerry presidential campaign
and the Obama 2008
campaign.
File photo
South Bend Mayor Pete
Buttigieg on a previous
Brooklyn visit.
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