I'm a writer and editor at Forbes, covering all things quantitative through long-form articles, infographics and interactive applications.
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The G.W.B. doesn’t disappoint. It’s really big—the roadway is almost a mile long and is suspended more than 200 feet above the surface of the Hudson River—but it’s also digestible. Walking across it doesn’t take terribly long, and it’s actually a bit easier than the walk across the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridges, since the deck links a high point in New Jersey to a high point in Manhattan.
The day that I took this walk, the south sidewalk was closed, so I used the walkway on the north side of the bridge. The natural scenery up the river is just as magnificent as the man-made scenery downriver.
From the metro area that gives us such names as Hoboken, Weehawken, Hackensack*, Harsimus Cove and Throgs Neck, comes Yonkers, which sits across the city line from the Bronx. It’s visible from the bridge.
The Cloisters, part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sits on the top of a hill in Fort Tryon Park at the very northern tip of Manhattan. Its tower pokes through the trees in this photo. Below it, just above the shoreline, is Robert Moses’s Henry Hudson Parkway. In The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, the construction of the Henry Hudson Parkway was where Moses went from arrogant-but-generally-good to essentially maniacal (but there were signs earlier, of course).
The views of Midtown are as good as ever, of course. The scale of the Empire State Building is, I think, best appreciated from this distance, where it still overpowers just about everything else.
As we cross over the Manhattan shoreline on the bridge, we can see railroad tracks below us. These were originally built by the New York Central to gain access to the West Side (its Grand Central Terminal is on the East Side). Now they’re owned by Amtrak, which uses them for trains to Albany and Chicago. These tracks and the environment around them in the early 20th century inspired Robert Moses to pursue public works in the first place. When he built Riverside Park and the Henry Hudson Parkway, the tracks were the source of much of his funding, part of which came directly from the New York Central and another chunk of which came from Federal funds earmarked for the elimination of railroad grade crossings.
Upon arriving in Manhattan, we’re greeted by the sight of the George Washington Bridge Bus Terminal (in the foreground). Behind it are residential towers that are located directly on top of the Cross-Manhattan Expressway segment of I-95.
And now, a final view of the bridge.
The tour is over. The A train whisks me back downtown, and safely home to Park Slope.
Another bus ride brings me to Fort Lee, New Jersey, named for the Revolution-era fortifications from which the Continental Army defended the upper Hudson River. Today, the town is better known for hosting the western end of the George Washington Bridge and, I’m told, a substantial group of people affiliated with Columbia University who don’t want to pay Manhattan rents.
Fort Lee has a small-scale downtown area, complete with those indicators of prosperity, Starbucks and Borders. Many of the stores and restaurants serve the area’s large Korean population.
But in some sense the real center of Fort Lee shifted north after the George Washington Bridge was built and the convenience of driving across it was realized. Much of the city was built in what appears to have been one colossal belch of ill-considered, garage-based, post-war development.
But Fort Lee has one really, really huge thing going for it: Palisades Interstate Park stretches north from here, passing the New York state line. The southern tip of the park just south of the George Washington Bridge is called the Fort Lee Historic Park.
Entering the park from Fort Lee involves walking up a long set of stairs into a dark forest and emerging shortly to find a 1970s-style visitor center. It was here, the center explains, that George Washington defended the Hudson River (unsuccessfully) against the approaching British in 1776.
The museum includes everything you’d expect from a visitor center in a historic park, including lots of reproduction flags and big displays where small flashing lights show the positions of Washington’s troops. Classic.
Just a hundred yards or so beyond the visitor’s center, the woods open up and an overlook provides a spectacular view of the river, the bridge, and the city.
The Bridge’s sinewy construction is magnificently displayed from here. It was one of the first major works of Swiss engineer Othmar Ammann (whose last major bridge was the Verrazano-Narrows). The towers had been intended to be clad in stonework designed by Cass Gilbert, but cost considerations left the steelwork exposed.
Beneath the Manhattan tower is the lighthouse immortalized in Hildegarde Swift’s The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge.
From here, we can see two more major bridges: on the left in the picture below is the superstructure for the Hell’s Gate Bridge, a railroad bridge said to be one of the strongest in the world, on which Othmar Amman did some engineering work. To the right are the towers of Robert Moses’s great Triborough Bridge.
From here it’s easy to get to the sidewalks across the bridge.
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