The historic Carroll Street Bridge reopened Monday after a five-year repair project shut down the key connection over the Gowanus Canal.
The landmarked 137-year-old crossing is one of the oldest in the city and has a unique design. It’s shaped like a trapezoid and is retractable — it can split apart to allow boats and barges to pass.
The bridge closed in 2021 after it was damaged by equipment deployed through the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup of the canal, a superfund site that’s filled with toxic waste.
The crossing used to be open to vehicle traffic, but is now only available for pedestrians, cyclists and emergency vehicles. A vintage sign now hangs on the bridge that reads: “Ordinance of the City any person driving over this bridge faster than a walk will be subject to a penalty of five dollars for each offense.”
The Gowanus Remediation Team, which is overseeing the canal’s cleanup effort, wrote in a statement that the bridge would still need to open frequently for 20 minutes at a time to let cleanup equipment through.
The Carroll Street Bridge is a rarity. There are only four other wooden retractable bridges like it in the country, according to the city Department of Transportation. There are two in Boston, which are not in use, and one on Borden Avenue in Long Island City, Queens.
The reopened bridge sits in the heart of the newly rezoned area of Gowanus, which has seen a residential boom in the last few years with new apartment buildings sprouting up along the canal. For many residents who’ve moved in recently, they’ve only seen the bridge closed.
“I've been walking down here for the past year every day looking at the construction, so it's exciting that it's done,” resident Kyle Goodwin, 29, who stopped by to walk across the bridge, said Monday afternoon. “ I didn't really think it was gonna happen there for a while. It looked a little sparse over here for a while, so it was really exciting the past few months to see it happen.”
During the superfund cleanup, contractors were installing steel pipe piles around the perimeter of the bridge, which damaged the structure so badly it could no longer open and close. A section of the span had to "be replaced in order to restore function of the bridge and for the roadway to be reopened,” a construction report found.
The bridge, which now has a fresh coat of blue paint, restored cobblestones leading to it and fresh wood planks, turned into a sort of destination for people in adjacent neighborhoods on Monday.
“ I went way out of the way just to ride this, so I'm a little bit more of, like, a bridge foamer,” said Tony McIntosh, 30, from Park Slope.
