Kosciuszko

The Kosciuszko Bridge ( KOZ-ee-UUSK-oh, KOZH-ee-UUSH-koh), originally known as the Meeker Avenue Bridge, is a cable-stayed bridge over Newtown Creek in New York City, connecting Greenpoint in Brooklyn to Maspeth in Queens. The bridge consists of a pair of cable-stayed bridge spans: the eastbound span opened in April 2017, while the westbound span opened in August 2019. An older bridge, a truss bridge of the same name that was located on the site of the westbound cable-stayed span, was originally opened in 1939 and was closed and demolished in 2017. The crossing is part of the Brooklyn–Queens Expressway (BQE), which carries Interstate 278. The older truss bridge replaced the historical swing bridge which connected Meeker Avenue in Brooklyn to Laurel Hill Boulevard in Queens. The 1939 Kosciuszko Bridge carried six lanes of traffic, three in each direction. In 1940, a year after opening, the bridge was renamed after Polish military leader Tadeusz Kościuszko, who fought alongside the Americans in the American Revolutionary War. In 2014, a contract was awarded and work begun to build one of two replacement bridges with more capacity, with the first bridge initially carrying bidirectional traffic. The replacement bridges have the same name as the original bridge, and are both cable-stayed bridges that are designed to carry one direction of traffic, though the southern span initially carried both directions. The first bridge, located south of the old truss bridge, opened on April 27, 2017, with three lanes in each direction. Once the old bridge was demolished via controlled explosion in October 2017, a new westbound cable-stayed bridge with four lanes and a bike/pedestrian path started construction on the site of the old bridge. The first cable-stayed bridge became eastbound-only with five lanes when the westbound bridge opened on August 29, 2019.