Wednesday, April 01, 2020

Gil Hodges-Marine Parkway Memorial Bridge

Stealing this from my own post in the Church of the Double-Bladed Paddle group. The group's founder asked for a "bridge binge" recently, and I shared this photo from my "Rebel Without a Clue" paddle weekend before last, with a little information about the bridge. It occurs to me that I show this bridge here all the time, but I'm not sure I've ever told much about it. And it's kind of a good bit of NYC history, so I'm going to share it with you here, now.

It'ss commonly known as the Marine Park Bridge, after the Brooklyn neighborhood on the north end of the bridge, but its real name is the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. I'm not a big baseball fan, but it's a neat NYC story - Gil Hodges played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, beginning the same year as Jackie Robinson, and then years later was the manager of the 1969 "Miracle Mets". A bridge between Brooklyn and Queens (where the Mets play) is the perfect tribute.

Another neat thing about this bridge - there is a pair of peregrine falcons who nest in the south tower. I got to see one of them once when I was so early for a whalewatching trip (yes, we have whalewatching now in NYC, how cool is that?) that I had time for a walk from Riis Landing up to the south tower and back.



Read more about Gil Hodges on Wikipedia. Very interesting guy!

2 comments:

songbird's crazy world said...

Cool view of the bridge.

Karen BakingInATornado said...

What an interesting place to visit, and I'd never heard of a Guitar Fish, very cool looking.