Happy Birthday, Bear Mountain Bridge

The Bear Mountain Bridge is now 100 years old.

On November 27, 1924, Mary Harriman, mother of Roland Harriman, President of the Bear Mountain Hudson River Bridge Company, helped preside over the formal opening day ceremonies with the bridge being officially opened to traffic on Thanksgiving Day.

The bridge was the first vehicular river crossing between New York City and Albany. At the time it was built, it was also the longest suspension bridge in the world and the first suspended bridge to have a concrete deck.

The project of building the Bear Mountain Bridge marked the beginning of a golden age of long span bridge building along the Hudson River and throughout the New York metropolitan area as well as paving the way for the building of other suspension bridges, such as the George Washington and the Golden Gate in San Francisco.

The New York State Bridge Authority purchased the Bear Mountain Bridge from the Bear Mountain Hudson River Bridge Company in 1940 for $2,275,000. One of the authority’s first achievements was to lower the basic passenger car rate from 80 cents to 50 cents each way. On January 1, 1942, the toll was lowered further to 35 cents and then to 25 cents each way three years later.

Since the Bridge Authority assumed stewardship of the Bear Mountain Bridge, annual traffic has grown from just under 483,000 vehicle crossings at the end of World War II to more than 7.8 million in 2019, its 95th anniversary year.

In 2018, an act of the State Legislature, introduced by Assemblywoman Sandy Galef and Senator Bill Larkin, bestowed the ceremonial designation Purple Heart Veterans Memorial Bear Mountain Bridge. 

Last weekend, formal ceremonies commemorated the century anniversary of the span with antique cars and fire department vehicles crossing the bridge from the Rockland County side to Putnam County in a procession.