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Your New York State Thruway, superhighway and Main Street
of the great Empire State is extended another
twenty-eight miles from Suffern to lower Yonkers.
Motorists and truckers now have four-hundred and twenty-four miles
of this longest of all expressways.
This ties the New York Metropolitan Area with Upstate New York
and provides connections with expressways in neighboring states.
The most spectacular project of the thruway is the
Three Mile Bridge spanning the historic Tappan Zee
section of the Hudson River between Tarrytown and Nyack.
This is the largest bridge of its type in the world.
First test borings for this sixty-million dollar structure was sunk in mid-1951.
Actual construction work started in March of 1952.
Vast quantities of steel and concrete soon formed the foundation.
There are more than one-hundred and fifty-three thousand cubic yards of concrete.
Fourteen thousand tons of reinforcing steel and almost
sixty thousand tons of structural steel in the bridge.
It has over twenty-seven acres of pavement
spread over six wide lanes. Three in each direction.
The most unique feature of the bridge
is use of huge underwater boxes, eight in number,
which on the river bottom at mid channel
and serve as brilliant foundations to support
about seventy percent of the bridge’s dead weight.
These concrete boxes, the largest the size of a big city block,
were built here in a natural dry basin ten miles north of the bridge.
The basin then was flooded.
Tug boats hauled the boxes into the Hudson River
and towed them to the bridge site.
The first caisson was moved down river in October of 1953.
Back at the bridge site each of the boxes was carefully jockeyed
into a corral filled with water and
sunk to its precise river bottom location.
As the weight of the foundations and superstructure was added
the boxes were pumped dry for the desired buoyancy to support the bridge.
Part of the vast construction process involved
the placing of nineteen of these huge deck replacement fans.
These also were fabricated ten miles north of the bridge
and floated into place atop their concrete foundations.
This steel girder made history last September
when it was lifted from a river barge to form
the final steel link in the main channel span.
Your thruway bridge is now formally open with another
twenty-five miles of the longest, safest,
best engineered superhighway in the world.
Another historic chapter to the rich heritage
of New York State and its cross state thruway.