Williamsburg Bridge, Contract 7

Rank #11
Cost: $230 million

The Williamsburg Bridge was beginning to show its age, so the Department of Transportation invested $1 billion to bring one of the world's longest suspension bridges up to snuff.

The department discovered deterioration and severe corrosion of the steel girders, floor beams and railroad tracks during a routine inspection of the bridge in 1988. After shutting down the bridge for two months to all vehicular and train traffic to perform emergency construction on the bridge, it launched into a full-scale, long-term rehabilitation of the bridge, divvying up the work into eight contracts.

The completion of the $230 million Contract 7, which included the reconstruction of the Manhattan-bound roadways and walkway, marked the total renovation of all of the bridge's supports, roadways and rail tracks.

During the 13-year construction process, the project team - led by Yonkers Contracting Co., Consoer Townsend Envirodyne Engineers of New York Inc. and the Parsons Transportation Group - was allowed to stop traffic once a week for 15 minutes at a time, at 1 a.m. - yet Contract 7 was completed nearly two months ahead of schedule.

The timely execution of the redevelopment contracts was preceded by a lengthy planning process. The department initially considered replacing the Williamsburg Bridge entirely.

Some replacement options included building a single-deck, cable-stayed bridge; a cable-stayed bridge with six traffic lanes on the upper deck and six subway tracks on the lower deck; a conventional dual-deck suspension bridge; a dual-deck cable-stayed bridge situated on a giant concrete block; and a dual-deck bridge with a hybrid design with elements of both suspension and cable-stayed bridges.

Ultimately, Parsons decided on rehabilitating the bridge rather than replacing it because it would interrupt the traffic the least. The eight contracts detailed replacing the cable suspension system; the replacement of the Brooklyn and Manhattan-bound roadways; the installation of new orthotropic decks; new underpinnings for two subway tracks for the JMZ lines; and rehabilitating the towers and reinforcing the stiffening truss.

Contract 7 in particular replaced the north roadway along the length of the superstructure and the approaches and also created a viaduct connecting the bridge to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

Each new approach to the bridge required the installation of 2,500 piles, each with a capacity of 150 tons. Truss work was also a massive task. For the Manhattan approach to the foot walk, for example, 24 truss sections weighing in at 90 tons apiece were lifted into place with cranes.

Now the Williamsburg Bridge, first built for $7 million in 1896 by Leffert Buck to relieve traffic over the Brooklyn Bridge, carries 140,000 vehicles a day over eight lanes, using two inner and two outer roadways.

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