Audubon Park Historic District
This way to return to your walk . . .
The Trinity Church Vestry has decided on increasing the value of its property... uptown by the erection of a suspension bridge across the Boulevard, near Carmansville...Where the Boulevard bisects Trinity Cemetery at Carmansville, it is proposed to connect the two parts...by means of an iron suspension bridge, the foundation of which was laid on Tuesday afternoon...Two piers of Ohio stone, solid abutments, 22 by 6 at the base, will be erected on both sides of the road.  Over them will be constructed two massive towers, gothic, with columns 55 feet high, of blue rock-faced work, between which arcade arches will pass. From them the bridge, 177 feet long by 14 wide will be suspended by 3 1/2-inch wire cable, and 3/4-inch iron vertial rods supporting the ornate cast-iron front, with medaltons of floreated device and a bow with ornamental tiles in panels.  The work, according to the terms of the contract, will be completed by the 1st of next December at a cost of $42,000.
  New York Times
June 15, 1871

The slender suspension bridge which spans Broadway between 153rd and 155th Streets, connecting the two sections of Old Trinity Cemetery, which extends from Amsterdam Avenue westward to the Hudson, is to be torn down...

Preliminary work has already been begun toward the erection of the [new] church in the cemetery. This consisted in the removal of between twenty and thirty graves from the northeast corner of Broadway and 155th Street to another part of the cemetery to make room for the church foundations.  It was said yesterday that in several of these graves the coffins had apparently never been occupied... a representative of Trinity Corporation... suggested as a possible explanation that when the bodies were removed forty-two years ago to permit of the extension of Broadway through the cemetery the workmen had been careless in the performance of their task, and in order to conceal the resultant confusion had buried empty coffins, so that the new graves might agree in number with the old.
New York Times
April 4, 1911

Visible in the background of early picture above is the steeple of the (second) Church of the Intercession.

A later view below includes the rarely seen Convent of the Sisters of the Annunciation directly behind the bridge on the northeast corner of 155th Street.  Several doors away to the east (and hidden by the east tower of the bridge) was the Washington Heights Athenaeum, designed by William Milne Grinnell and opened with great fanfare in 1886.  After a decade of culture, the Athenaeum Society sold the building to the YMCA.
Webmaster's collection
Trinity Bridge over the Boulevard(Broadway)
Designed and constructed by Vaux & Withers, 1872 and removed in 1911
Funded by the Audubon Park Alliance