BQE I-278 Overpass at Cadman Plaza Downtown Brooklyn

BQE I-278 Overpass at Cadman Plaza Downtown Brooklyn Image 0Cadman Plaza as it appeared in June of 1998, heads east beneath the Brooklyn Queens Expressway towards the Downtown Brooklyn courthouses and Brooklyn City Center, which is unseen past the greenery up ahead. On the far left, the upper deck of the cantilevered section of the BQE does the limbo dance under the Brooklyn Bridge approach on it's way to Queens. The lower deck of the famous cantilever highway section heads southwest towards the Verrazzano Narrows Bridge and the shore hugging Belt Parkway, with a pit stop beforehand at the Battery Tunnel. The two old Whitestone-style directional signs bookending the overpass continued to hang in there, despite the rust and fading. A number of them still survived on service road entrances to the highway in this area, although the green overheads, such as the one on the upper deck, long ago supplanted them on the highway.
BQE I-278 Overpass at Cadman Plaza Downtown Brooklyn Image 1The vista from the other side of the BQE overpass looking west toward Manhattan brought the unmistakable Brooklyn Bridge into view. The upper-deck BQE traffic races for Queens, while the lower deck hurtles towards the south. Clearly visible is the disintegrating concrete of the highway support in the center median of Cadman Plaza.
As of 2017, not much has really changed over the 20 years since I took the photos, save for the street lighting now being LED panels. Even the poles look the same. The old rusting Whitestone era directional sign though is long gone, as are its lighting standard counterparts that once graced Cadman Plaza's Brooklyn Bridge approaches. Once reconstruction commences however on the crumbling cantilevered section, all of this may radically change.
Shocking though, Google Earth's 2017 views looking west betray that the crumbling concrete visible in the overpass's center support wall IS STILL THE SAME! Somehow the erosion's progress was suspended in time, because it doesn't look any worse for wear after 20 years.