Manhattan Bridge View from Washington Street

Dumbo’s most famous view: a bridge tower framed by an old factory street

Local name: Washington Street, Dumbo

Collection: Brooklyn: the Heights and DUMBO · USA · Open in OpenStreetMap

The Manhattan Bridge at the end of Washington Street, with the Empire State Building in the gap · Christian David, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons

The story

Before you is Washington Street in Dumbo. At the end of the street, between the old factories, stands a tower of the Manhattan Bridge. The bridge opened to traffic on the thirty-first of December 1909, although work on it went on for several more years. It was designed by the engineer Leon Moisseiff. It was the first bridge built on the so-called deflection theory. That theory held that a suspension bridge is stronger than people had thought. So it has no massive stiffening trusses like the neighboring Williamsburg Bridge. The bridge carries cars, subway trains, people on foot, and cyclists. All around are former factories. Many streets in the neighborhood still have their granite block paving and the rails of an old factory railroad. Much of the western half of the neighborhood was built up by Robert Gair. He made paper boxes, and in 1879 he worked out how to make folding cardboard boxes quickly. In 1888 Gair moved his production here, to the corner of Washington Street and Water Street. In 1904, on this street, he built a factory made entirely of reinforced concrete, one of the first large factories of its kind in America. The area was even nicknamed Gairville. In the late 1970s artists began moving into the empty factory floors. They named the area Dumbo, from the first letters of “Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.” In 2007 the city made the neighborhood a historic district. And this view was made famous by Sergio Leone’s film “Once Upon a Time in America”: the street and the bridge appear on its poster.

Visiting

Washington Street between Water Street and Front Street, Dumbo; the York Street subway station is close by. You can visit any time, free. By day it is crowded with photographers; it is quieter early in the morning. From spring until winter the block is usually closed to cars during the day, but cars do use it in the morning and late evening, so do not stand in the roadway.