In 1987, the Williamsburg Bridge was in a dire state of disrepair. Its cables were corroding, the steel towers were decaying, its foundation was cracking, and the entire bridge was swaying and creaking to a degree that alarmed the engineers who were tasked with monitoring it. And so the city was faced with a decision: repair the bridge piece by piece, despite its apparent lack of overall structural integrity, or tear it down and build a new one in its place, leaving northern Brooklyn partially cut off from Manhattan for over three years.
This largely forgotten dilemma has been recently cited by Williamsburg locals fighting a potential L train shutdown, which threatens to sever commuters' ties between northern Brooklyn and Manhattan for as many as three years. In the end, the city wound up shutting down the bridge for just over a month—to cars and also the J and M subway lines—conducting additional repairs with limited lanes open over the next decade. But that six-week closure was enough to rattle business owners and commuters in 1988, and the northern Brooklyn community was as vocal in its opposition to a three-year shutdown of bridge service as it is to today's potential break in L train service.
The Williamsburg Bridge's problems only really came to light when a six-foot beam fell into the river and left a gaping hole in the bridge's side in August of 1987, though it was later revealed that city officials had known about the bridge's failings since 1971. After the beam fell, Mayor Ed Koch tasked a committee with looking into the bridge's structural integrity and assessing the pros and cons of repairing the bridge or replacing it altogether. At the time, the NY Times reported that the former would cost $250 million, while the latter might cost twice as much.
Repairing the bridge's cables while keeping it open to traffic seemed an impossible task: the reporter wrote that "replacing them without closing the bridge would be akin to restringing a pearl necklace while it is around someone's neck."
Given the grim outlook of things, the city called for proposals to replace the ailing bridge as it waited for the technical advisory committee to present its findings, which were due by July of 1988. To take down the bridge and build a new one in its place would take 38 months.
The proposals ranged from the practical to the fanciful. One suggested building two bridges on sliding bases before demolishing the existing bridge, and then bringing the two together. Another group proposed a breathtaking cable bridge with far more aesthetic value than the existing structure. And then there was the ambitious proposal that wanted to cover the bridge with bronze mirrors and fill its towers with a restaurant, bar, lounge, and museum.
That third proposal was from architect Der Scutt, who designed Trump Tower, and The Donald himself offered to pay for the construction of a new bridge, calling it "a helluva problem." Mayor Koch was less than enthusiastic about that offer.
"He never built a bridge in his life to the best of my knowledge," Koch said at the time.
The situation became far less speculative just a month later, when engineers found significant cracks in the bridge that gave it a five percent chance of failing—i.e., collapsing and dumping traffic into the East River. At the time, officials anticipated that the bridge would remain closed for at least two weeks, though then-DOT chief engineer Samuel Schwartz said, that was "the most optimistic scenario, and an unlikely one."
Indeed, the damage was worse than feared: inspectors found beams that had severely corroded. As one engineer poetically described it, the beams' constant contact with dirty, salty, water effectively turned them into batteries, with a small electrical current provided by the constantly flowing water.
''The steel becomes a sacrificial anode,'' Dr. John Fisher told the Times in April of 1988. ''The metal consumes itself.''
The bridge remained closed for just over six weeks. During that time, the 240,000 commuters who relied on the bridge had to turn to the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queensboro bridges—and the latter two each had two closed lanes. With the J and M trains unable to go between the two boroughs, the MTA doubled service on the L train and added additional cars to the C, but recommended using the L, as at that point it had the fewest riders of all the nearby lines. Pedestrians and cyclists were still permitted on the bridge.
Williamsburg and the Lower East Side felt the impact of the bridge closure immediately. One owner of a restaurant on Delancey Street near the bridge said that his establishment was unusually empty during the lunch hour. Ralph Colon, a storeowner who lived in northern Brooklyn but owned a store that was also on Delancey Street, had to walk across the bridge to get to work, and said that his shop was more or less empty just two days after the closure.
''We rely on people driving by and stopping,'' he told the Times. "Now, you could play football out in the street. It's going to hurt.''
The city wound up turning two lanes of traffic on Delancey Street into 250 parking spots to attract more customers. But on the Brooklyn side of the bridge, things were particularly grim for merchants. A flower shop worker in Williamsburg who'd worked there for 40 years said that he'd never seen a drop in business like the one that occurred during the six week shutdown, and the owner of a coffee shop on South Fourth Street said that her employees were spending most of their time cleaning, taking inventory, and on breaks. The owner of a grocery store at 185 Havemeyer Street—which now appears to be a nail salon—saw his sales drop from as much as $800 a day to $300 a day.
''It's a little on the quiet side, like living in the country," Moses Susholz, another Williamsburg business owner, told the Times that May. ''If it was residential, it wouldn't be so bad, but it's not any good for business.''
Meanwhile, Mayor Koch's technical advisory committee was still on deadline to present its recommendations by July of 1988. The committee sought input from the communities immediately connected by the Williamsburg Bridge, and community leaders from El Puente, Los Sures, Brooklyn's Community Board 1, and Brooklyn Legal Services, along with leaders from the area's Hasidic, Polish, and Latino communities, formed a coalition to make known their opposition to a three-year span without the bridge.
They organized several marches across the bridge, as well as rallies on the Lower East Side and countless community meetings in both Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Activists sent around petitions and spearheaded a letter-writing campaign, until the city finally set aside the idea of shutting down the bridge for any long stretch of time.
Based on his committee's preliminary conclusions, the mayor announced in early June of 1988 that the Williamsburg Bridge would be repaired, not replaced. Those repairs cost $350 million and lasted into the early 2000s. Half of the bridge's lanes remained open throughout the repairs, subway service on the J and M resumed, and rents in Williamsburg proceeded to skyrocket.
The brief bridge shutdown of 1988 was enough to worry Williamsburg residents at the time —but it was nothing compared to potential impact of an L train shutdown, says Felice Kirby, who has lived in the area since 1979 and is one of the organizers of the L Train Coalition against the shutdown. She was also involved in organizing against the three-year bridge closure, from the first day she heard about it at a meeting at Community Board One.
"The area was very different then," Kirby told Gothamist. "The L train was not the crazy, overcrowded place that it is. The weekend traffic was very light in the area; there was almost no tourism. The waterfront was pretty much abandoned. The inconvenience of the bridge shutdown, the ghost town effect that it created, was for all the residents that lived there and commuters using the Williamsburg Bridge to get to the BQE. It's as if it was a different era in the town of New York...gentrification was really under the radar in Brooklyn then."
Many of the activists organizing against the potential L train shutdown were also involved in the 1988 protests against the bridge closure, Kirby said, though there is also an influx of younger people who have moved to Williamsburg in recent years. Together, they are hoping to pull off a similar save.
"We have the older activists like me and people before me who are still here and remember how profoundly the city can be wrong in its judgment about what is best for a community, and then we have thousands of new, younger people who hopefully will be activated to fight for their own best interests," Kirby said. "Hopefully they won't ignore this and not accept that what government tells you is always right, always true, always the best. We're trying to foster that as we did many years ago."
