The southbound approach from The Bronx toll plaza of the Throgs Neck Bridge is a long winding affair, as it snakes around the Fort Schuyler Naval Base. The funky overhead digital sign was part of a group installed not long before these photos were shot at the end of November 1999.
Opened in 1961, the Throgs Neck Bridge was the next to last great suspension bridge to be built in New York City. The 1964 opening of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, linking Brooklyn and Staten Island, marked the end of the halcyon era in New York of magnificent suspension bridge building.

There's something terribly inscrutable about these stub-masted lampposts. The authority in charge of this bridge has never been able to leave its hapless lighting alone for more than a few years at a time. This is one of the few places within NYC where cutoff type luminaires are employed. They don't use them on the other bridges to the west, at least as of 1999 when I originally wrote this. I guess the East Bronx and Bayside, Queens have more politically connected astronomers. Save for the cut off design, these light fixtures look like the same ones then present on the nearby Bronx-Whitestone Bridge.

No curves of course as we near the bridge's mid span. Not much traffic either on this Sunday morning. The Throgs Neck Bridge was generally, in my experience, the more traffic friendly of the three Bronx-Queens crossings, but it can have its moods too. As noted above, the Bronx side curves were due to the presence of Fort Schuyler. On the Queens side another long winding descent was necessitated, at least in part, by the low shoreline. On that note I will cease my engineering-minded ruminations, as they may well serve to render me ridiculous.