“Bouncy Bridge” Closed Again

By on July 16, 2018 10:11 pm in 11201, brooklyn bridge park, News

If you’ve walked by the entrance to Squibb Park on Columbia Heights or along the pedestrian and bike walkway that parallels Pier One in Brooklyn Bridge Park (which is where your correspondent got the photo) anytime since Friday you’ve probably noticed that the Squibb Park, or “Bouncy” pedestrian bridge has been closed again. Brooklyn Bridge Park Corporation President Eric Landau has given the following explanation:

We recently completed a routine inspection of Squibb Bridge, and unfortunately, discovered a piece of wood in poor condition. Out of an abundance of caution, we have temporarily closed the bridge while our engineers conduct further analysis. This analysis will fully inform the appropriate repair and associated timeline.

Since Squibb Bridge reopened in the Spring of 2017, it has again become a popular and vital access point to Brooklyn Bridge Park, and we are committed to ensuring that it remains one.

We are working closely with our engineers to reopen the bridge as soon as possible and will provide updates. We appreciate everyone’s patience and understanding.

We hope it will re-open soon.

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  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7nPOzGeyaw Arch Stanton

    Spot on. The bridge is a seriously flawed design and the incompetent construction management extends into other areas of the park as well.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7nPOzGeyaw Arch Stanton

    Sorry hon, I just have no tolerance for conspiracy theories.

  • http://www.yotamzohar.com StudioBrooklyn

    What is flawed about it, other than its propensity to elicit shrill cries of “Danger!” from people who get seasick at 1G?

  • Rick

    Well I saw some guy sitting on his bed in his underwear, glaring at pedestrians on the bridge, and I suspect his bedroom isn’t in a common area!

  • gc

    Seriously, how long can it possibly take to replace/repair
    ” a piece of wood in poor condition”?

  • Banet

    It depends. If it was one of the structural members underneath the walkway it could take weeks.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7nPOzGeyaw Arch Stanton

    Hummm lets see, two major closings since it opened for structural problems. I tend to think that’s a flawed design.

  • gc

    It took us less time to send a man to the moon. Of course that was almost 50 years ago.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7nPOzGeyaw Arch Stanton

    It’s not a deck board in question, but a structural component. Could take months…

  • http://www.yotamzohar.com StudioBrooklyn

    I don’t recall these structural problems ever being disclosed in-depth. All I know is, the bridge was bouncy, then they closed it for an eon, then it wasn’t bouncy anymore. Then it slowly got a tiny bit of bounce back in one section, and now it’s closed for “repairs”.

    The bridge was designed to be bouncy, right? The flaw in its design is its design?

  • KXrVrii1

    The bridge was originally designed to be bouncy.

    There was a flaw in its design, part of the fix was to make it not bouncy.

    So now, becoming bouncy again is a flaw in the current design.

  • http://www.yotamzohar.com StudioBrooklyn

    “There was a flaw in its design”

    I don’t know how much the average BH resident reads about this bridge but I feel like I’m somewhere in the middle of the bell curve, have been since the first closure. I have never read anything about this flaw you speak of except that it refers to the bridge’s bounciness.

    Do we have any idea what that original design flaw actually was? Do we take the BBPC’s statement at face value?

  • John S

    it was closed the first time for safety reasons. I use it twice a day, and I remember right before it closed it got very noticeably “bouncier”

  • http://www.yotamzohar.com StudioBrooklyn

    I’m aware that safety concerns were cited as the reason for closure. I just don’t buy that that the bridge was ever actually unsafe, neither then nor this time around.

  • John S

    This 450-foot bridge cost $4.1mm. It was opened from 2013-2014 then closed for 32 months. BBP sued designed because it was “flawed’ but went ahead with the estimated 700k repair project. The repair ended up costing over $2.5 mm.

    BBP is reluctant to answer questions about where that lawsuit is now. Instead they continue to fight lawsuits with the BHA and build new condos because they say they need the money — with zero regard to how adding a couple hundred more kids to PS 8 zone will impact schools or other environmental concerns.

    I’m happy to have brooklyn bridge park in our area and welcome the visitors, but you have to think without more prudent oversight and less money for a boat house, a $28 million dollar marina (always home to about 6 boats), and a proposed $10-15 million dollar pool, we could have gotten by with more green space and less condos. (I would have been happy to swap both the marina and the squibb pool for the Floating Lady, the much much much larger pool we had and gave up. That pool is now in it’s 11th season in the Bronx. Our loss is their gain)

  • NeighboorHood

    Well stated. This has always been the crux of our fight with the corrupt/incompetent BB Park Board. They created a circular mechanism to keep justifying condo building over park space by spending funds like drunken sailors then coming back to well saying “we need more funds”.
    Think about it, almost 8 MILLION DOLLARS for this fiasco alone (which many of us warned abput when they announced it BTW)?Where is the accounting oversight? Where is the responsibility to the public they are supposed to serve?

  • gc

    Is this fact or conjecture?

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7nPOzGeyaw Arch Stanton

    LOL, Hope he wasn’t looking for loose change those underpants.

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7nPOzGeyaw Arch Stanton

    Laughing out loud

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7nPOzGeyaw Arch Stanton

    Common sense, oh wait…

  • AndyHeights

    I just got back from a walk to the park and back to Henry Street, and I looked carefully, as I had never noticed “a sea of paper cups, candy wrappers, bottles, cans, and newspapers” before, and I didn’t notice any today either.

    It is a narrow sidewalk and it does get a bit crowded as folks pass one other going to and from the park, but quite honestly I’ve never encountered any rude or unruly folks or any “sea of garbage” on the way either.

  • gc

    For some of us “common sense is what tells us the earth is flat”

  • B.

    The trash cans will overflow and Sanitation won’t empty them. Forget it. Trash cans invite pyramids of refuse.

  • B.

    Precisely.

    After having to bear my next-door neighbor’s turning her paved backyard into a neighborhood basketball court, complete with shouted, vile curses both when a basket was made and when it wasn’t, for about three years, until she tired of cigarette butts in her flower beds, I now equate bouncing basketballs with imbecility and loutishness.

    Sad, because my favorite uncle played basketball for Indiana University back in the early 1930s and loved the game.

  • AnonyMom

    Interestingly enough, Brooklyn Bridge Park brought in Arup to fix the “bounciness” of the bridge. FYI, Arup is the engineering firm that was involved with the design and construction of the London Milllennium Bridge which was notoriously defective when it opened in 2000. On top of that, the “bouncy bridge” cost almost 4 x’s the estimated 700K to “fix” it.

  • gatornyc

    There are about 6 units total that are exposed to the bridge so I’m not buying that these 6 units have enough pull to compel the park to close the bridge. And these units were heavily discounted on account of the exposure. It’s not like the bridge wasn’t there first. So there is NO basis for the residents to complain (similar to the south-facing residents of OBBP’s complaint about the new buildings).

  • gatornyc

    The park sued the bridge architect for defective design. The pleadings are all publicly available. There has been quite a bit of reporting about this as well.

  • gatornyc

    This is very “get the hell of my lawn” of you.

  • Andrew Porter

    Maybe “sea of garbage” is a euphemism for, uh…

  • Andrew Porter

    Yes, the hell of my lawn, the agony of my feet, the curse of my werewolves…

    Unless this was a typo?

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