Some Things Just Must Be Remembered

The BQE is historic, but not in a good way:

A state agency has lifted a puzzling bureaucratic roadblock that significantly delayed a long-awaited plan to replace the traffic-choked Kosciuszko Bridge.

The Historic Preservation Office last week abandoned its push to preserve the deteriorating bridge, thus ending an inter-agency squabble that delayed final approval of the project by at least six months, the Daily News confirmed Wednesday.

The state Transportation Department had originally anticipated receiving federal authorization for the roughly $700 million project — the final regulatory hurdle — by the end of last year.

However, as The News first reported last month, the DOT was forced to shelve the project last November after Historic Preservation objected to final design plans that call for the Kosciuszko to be demolished and replaced by two new parallel bridges.

Preservation officials deemed the aging span “a significant and unusual variation of the Warren truss type bridge” and argued that a rehab was “a prudent and feasible alternative to demolition,” according to a letter obtained by The News.

In response, DOT officials presented Historic Preservation with a report justifying replacement of the 1939 bridge, which carries the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek between Maspeth, Queens, and Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

The report addressed safety concerns, such as its steep grade and substandard merging lanes — factors responsible for bottlenecked traffic and a high accident rate, according to the DOT.

In a written response on Friday, Historic Preservation officials threw in the towel.

“We concur that there are no prudent and feasible alternatives to the demolition of this historic bridge,” an official wrote. “We find that correction of many of the substandard safety features would significantly alter character-defining features of the bridge.”