History, Natural History & the Arts
The most traveled of the New York State Bridge Authority’s bridges, the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge carries more than 25 million crossings a year on Interstate 84.
In February 1951, NYS Assembly Majority Leader Lee B. Mailler of Cornwall introduced a bill calling for test borings to be conducted for a bridge over the Hudson River between Beacon and Newburgh. [Read more…] about The Newburgh-Beacon Bridge: A History & Engineering Primer
What follows is a booklet by Irene E. Wegle, Corresponding Secretary of The Historical Society of Newburgh Bay and the Highlands from the November 2, 1963 opening of the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge.
The Newburgh-Beacon Ferry, which has been in operation on the Hudson River between the cities of Newburgh and Beacon, is [sic, was] the oldest in the United States, having been given its franchise from Queen Anne of England in 1743. [Read more…] about The Newburgh-Beacon Ferry, 1743-1963
We recently passed the 50th anniversary of the release of Robert Caro’s Pulitzer-prize-winning book about Robert Moses: The Power Broker. Exhaustively comprehensive, Caro’s monumental tome nonetheless virtually ignores one of the most fascinating chapters of Moses’s career: his time as Chairman of the Power Authority of the State of New York (PASNY) from 1954 to 1962.
While heading PASNY, known today as the New York Power Authority, the legendary New York City builder oversaw the remaking of Niagara Falls and the St. Lawrence River for hydropower. [Read more…] about Robert Moses’s Imperial Niagara and St. Lawrence Megaprojects
James R. McManus was born in Hell’s Kitchen in 1936 and recently died in 2019. For 54 years (from 1962 to 2016) he was the Democratic Party District Leader from the Hell’s Kitchen area. This was a position that his father Eugene E. McManus had held for 20 years before him.
Previously Eugene McManus’s great grand uncle, Thomas J. McManus, had held the position, since the formation of the McManus Democratic Club in 1892, when he defeated the prior District Leader George Washington Plunkitt, author of Plunkitt of Tammany Hall: A Series of Very Plain Talks on Very Practical Politics (1905). [Read more…] about Tammany’s Last Stand: The McManus Club & The McGovern Campaign
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