To Fans, Queensboro Bridge Is a Steel Swan, Not an ‘Ugly Duckling’
This is about history, and not just because Monday is the 100th anniversary of the day the first cars officially crossed the Queensboro Bridge. This is about family history, the kind of history some might prefer to forget and certainly not speak about.
Somewhere on the East Side lives an 83-year-old woman who can look out her window at the Queensboro Bridge. This is the history part: The bridge outside her window — a 3,724-foot span of stone and steel and fanciful finials between the two anchor towers — is her ex-husband’s uncle’s bridge.
Or, to put it more clearly, Henry Hornbostel, the architect who designed the bridge, was the uncle of her former husband.
“It’s a family joke that she overlooks the bridge and sees it every day,” said her daughter, Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo, an art historian who also lives in Manhattan. “It’s a joke we all share, including her husband. We all appreciate the irony.”
Hornbostel’s creation, designed with Gustav Lindenthal, has a certain industrial, Erector Set symmetry that some bridge aficionados find irresistible. ...
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Somewhere on the East Side lives an 83-year-old woman who can look out her window at the Queensboro Bridge. This is the history part: The bridge outside her window — a 3,724-foot span of stone and steel and fanciful finials between the two anchor towers — is her ex-husband’s uncle’s bridge.
Or, to put it more clearly, Henry Hornbostel, the architect who designed the bridge, was the uncle of her former husband.
“It’s a family joke that she overlooks the bridge and sees it every day,” said her daughter, Elizabeth Valdez del Álamo, an art historian who also lives in Manhattan. “It’s a joke we all share, including her husband. We all appreciate the irony.”
Hornbostel’s creation, designed with Gustav Lindenthal, has a certain industrial, Erector Set symmetry that some bridge aficionados find irresistible. ...