BQE I-278 Northbound at Battery Tunnel Plaza in Red Hook

BQE I-278 Northbound at Battery Tunnel Plaza in Red Hook Image 0Brooklyn Queens Expressway northbound as it appeared in January, 1999, coming down from the Gowanus Expressway viaduct and preparing to descend into the Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill open cut ditch. Here the northbounders were about to swing around the sharp right curve from which they would descend into the open cut straightaway toward the next exit at Atlantic Avenue. Until a few years prior to 1999 southbounders put up with a similar 2 lane dead man's curve, but that section was completely rebuilt into a modern 3 lane Interstate standards compatible affair, with a much more gradual curve. Sooner or later, I figured they'd do the same here. Well, fast forwarding through time on Google Earth to nowadays, it does appear this northbound ramp has been rebuilt and retooled, but it still looks to me to be the same sharp curved, two lane hazard that it was before Y2K. You can put lipstick on a bottleneck, but it's still a bottleneck. This is just one of several places where the constantly shape-shifting I-278 BQE through lanes are more like exits than continuations. The leftmost lanes are heading down to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel.
BQE I-278 Northbound at Battery Tunnel Plaza in Red Hook Image 1The sharp right curve descends, hopefully no longer full of the ruts and potholes that marred it in 1999, into the open cut which straddles the Carroll Gardens and Cobble Hill neighborhoods to the right and the northern residual reaches of Red Hook to the left. The underpass merging with us on the right is an entrance ramp from Hamilton Avenue, which runs beneath the Gowanus viaduct, passing over the creek on a drawbridge that I got stuck behind a few times. It would be fair to say someone should have washed the walls. Even with the myriad construction activity since 1999, I'm not sure anyone has yet. The southbound lanes are rising for their wide swing around the tunnel plaza, onto the Gowanus Viaduct. The open cut runs almost to Atlantic Avenue, where the highway swings left, then right, onto the double decked Brooklyn Heights cantilever section.