The Outer Bridge

The Dumbest and Most Incredible Thing in New York City

If you live in New York City long enough, you will eventually drive across every major bridge in the city, of which there are probably more than you think.  I’m even ignoring all those bootleg bridges across the Harlem River between Manhattan and the Bronx, which you only go over if you have your GPS set to Maximize Danger. Any inventory of the city’s bridges starts with the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, both glorious, as you make your way up the East River to the Williamsburg, the 59th Street (Ed Koch), the Triborough (RFK), eventually reaching mainland North America via the George Washington, the Whitestone, and the Throgs Neck, and finally doubling back through Brooklyn to behold the sublime behemoth that is the Verrazano-Narrows. 

If you have ever driven to or from the city from locations south (or landed in Newark airport), there’s a strong chance that you have also driven across one of the three bridges connecting Staten Island to New Jersey.  Perhaps you have even traversed the outermost bridge in town, which sits at the southern-most point in the city, and the state: the aptly-named Outer Bridge.

Except the Outer Bridge is not its real name. 

As the highway signs indicate, it is actually called the Outerbridge Crossing.  Why?  Is it too small to be a bridge?  Nope.  Is there another technical reason they call it a crossing and not a bridge?  Nope.  It’s definitely a bridge.

The reason it’s called the Outerbridge Crossing is that Outerbridge is… wait for it… the name of the guy for whom the bridge is named.

Let that sink in. There is no hyperbole here.  I wouldn’t even call this a “fun fact.”  A fun fact is that the Verrazano Bridge is misspelled (it should have two z’s).  As for the Outer Bridge being named after a guy named Outerbridge?  This is a serious fact.  A scary fact.  There’s nothing fun about it.  It is a fact that, frankly, is so stupid and yet so great at the same time, I have a hard time processing it.

The background story is straightforward.  The Port Authority is the agency responsible for managing transportation between New York and New Jersey.  In 1928, the agency oversaw the construction of this bridge, along with the Goethals Bridge, which both connect New York to New Jersey.  The chairman of the Port Authority at the time was a guy named Eugenius Harvey Outerbridge.  He was not a bridge builder, but rather a businessman and inventor who eventually became a bureaucrat and public servant.  They named the new bridge, which purely by coincidence happens to be the outermost bridge in the city, after him. Other than the bridge, I am not aware of anything else that bears this man’s name.

Part of the reason I have a hard time processing this reality is that there is no overt recognition of the ludicrousness of the name.  It is just accepted as a fact with no discernible sense of irony.  In my mind it deserves a giant sign, a thousand feet high, with a circus clown on it, pointing to the bridge.  The other wild part is that no one today seems to know any of this.  Whenever I bring it up to anyone, they are always learning it for the first time.  And then they walk over to the other side of the room.  I only know it because when I was on a family road trip as a kid, my father told us as we were driving across the span.  Why were we going to New Jersey?  Lord only knows, but my father recognized the ridiculousness and laughed a menacing laugh when he told us.  And it blew my mind.

The reason for the menacing laugh, I imagine, is that there is a level of absurdity here that is difficult to square with everyday experience.  It actually comes close to the supernatural.  By way of contrast, there is a dentist who has an office a few blocks away from my house whose name is Dr. Feintuch.  That makes me chuckle, but does not send me reeling.  It’s an amusing and random coincidence, at best a self-fulfilling prophecy – a guy named Feintuch grew up and became a dentist.  And at least Feintuch is an actual name.  The Library Cop on Seinfeld was similarly named Bookman.  Also funny.  Also a real name.   

But here we have a name that not only literally describes the thing in itself – the bridge – but also denotes its physical location – the outer bridge.  It’s like building a stadium in the north part of town and naming it Northstadium Stadium.  Northstadium being the name of the person we named the stadium after.  So we decided to call it Northstadium Field instead.  But Northstadium is not a real name, you say?  And Outerbridge is? 

In addition to being eerily on the nose, the scale of the thing is tremendous.  It’s not an inside private joke.  It’s a reality that implicates everyone in the city – a cosmic prank played in an immediate sense on all 77,000 cars that traverse it every day. 

The nature of the coincidence warrants reflection as well.  To the conspiratorial minded, it bears all the hallmarks of a computer glitch – a flaw in the sensory-generating matrix governing our perceptions – a mistake that no one wants to acknowledge as being a mistake, because it pulls away the curtain on the whole shebang.

• Please enter the name of your first bridge:

• GOLDEN GATE

• The name of your bridge will be: The Golden Gate Bridge

• Please enter the name of your second bridge:

• OUTERBRIDGE

• The name of your bridge will be: The Outerbridge Bridge

• Shit!  How do I go back? Resubmit form!

But here’s the weirdest part.  I’ve known the truth about the Outerbridge Crossing since the 1980s, thanks to my father, God rest his soul, and as an adult I am able to look it up on the internet to confirm he was correct.  Yet in all those intervening years, not one person, dumb or smart, old or young, learned or uneducated, has indicated that they already knew the real origin of the name of the Outerbridge.

As everyone knows, one other earmark of a cosmic mistake is the subsequent cover-up.  Are the forces responsible for allowing such a ludicrous and improbably-named structure to exist in the largest city in America the same forces that ensure that literally no one knows about it?  A classic by-the-book Mistake Plus Cover-up, perhaps?    

Who’s to say?  Just don’t be surprised if the Outerbridge Crossing Wikipedia page starts generating a 404 Error Message, or at least links directly to an article detailing my untimely demise – a not-so-subtle warning to not write stupid posts about things I could not possibly fathom.  And also don’t be surprised when the Outerbridge Crossing gets renamed in the near future to honor some other guy whose name doesn’t mean exactly the same thing as what the thing actually is.  As an aside, if they are going to rename the bridge, my vote would be for the Howard Bridge, named after the last two guys who were unceremoniously stricken down by malevolent forces after getting too close to the truth.