Queens Boulevard Bridge Over Sunnyside Yard

Cost: $70 million

Development Team

Owner: New York City Department of Transportation
Prime Contractor: Perini Corp., Hawthorne, N.Y.
Prime Engineer: Amman & Whitney, NYC

It's been nearly a century since the Queens Boulevard Bridge, a 19-span, 1,100-ft. steel girder-stringer structure was built over the railroad yards in Sunnyside, Queens.

Queens has grown up around it, transforming from a semirural suburb of Manhattan into a densely populated residential urban area, home to many of the city's most recent wave of immigrants from Asia and Latin America. Today the bridge carries six lanes of traffic, about 50,000 vehicles a day, over 42 active tracks used by Amtrak, the Long Island Rail Road and the New York Atlantic Railroad.

Last year the New York City Department of Transportation completed a $70 million renovation of the bridge with Amman & Whitney as the chief engineer.

The local community board requested that a separate, 10-ft.-wide bicycle path be added to each side of the span, resulting in a wider bridge. In addition, the old bridge was designed to carry HS15, but current code requires HS25. These two factors resulted in a higher load being transferred to the foundation, which would have pushed it past its capacity had Amman & Whitney not come up with design innovations to reduce the load.

Toward this end, high-strength grade 50 steel was used for all new bridge components, including the entire substructure. The renovation was completed in 16 months.