Gray's Ferry Bridge
| Grays Ferry Avenue Bridge | |
|---|---|
This 1999 photo looks northwest at the Philadelphia, Wilmington & Baltimore Railroad Bridge No. 1. and, behind it, the Grays Ferry Avenue Bridge.
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| Coordinates | 39°56′28″N 75°12′18″W / 39.9411°N 75.205°WCoordinates: 39°56′28″N 75°12′18″W / 39.9411°N 75.205°W |
| Carries | Grays Ferry Avenue |
| Crosses | Schuylkill River, Northeast Corridor |
| Locale | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
| Owner | State Highway Agency |
| Maintained by | State Highway Agency |
| Preceded by | University Avenue Bridge |
| Followed by | Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Bridge No. 1 |
| Characteristics | |
| Design | Stringer/multi-beam or girder |
| Material | Steel continuous |
| Total length | 1,482 feet (452 m) |
| History | |
| Construction begin | 1976 |
| Opened | 1976 |
| Replaces | 1901 Grays Ferry Bridge |
| Statistics | |
| Daily traffic | 9,625 (in 2011) |
| References | |
Gray's Ferry Bridge (more recently, Grays Ferry Bridge) has been the formal or informal name of several floating bridges and four permanent ones that have carried highway and rail traffic over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. The bridge today is a four-lane divided highway bridge, built in 1976, that carries Grays Ferry Avenue from the Grays Ferry neighborhood on the east bank over the river and the Northeast Corridor railroad tracks to the Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood of Kingsessing. An abandoned 1902 railroad bridge, the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Bridge No. 1, sits just south of the highway bridge.
Before bridges crossed the Schuylkill, three ferries provided the main connections between Philadelphia and points west and south. Two of them crossed the river in or near the city limits:
The third, dubbed Lower Ferry, crossed south of the city proper and just south of the mouth of Mill Creek. It was likely established in 1673 or shortly thereafter by Benjamin Chambers, who was licensed to operate the ferry after Swedish settlers complained that they were blocked from passage on the Middle Ferry.
In 1696, the government directed that two roads be laid out from either end of the Lower Ferry, also called Chambers' Ferry: one from the east landing north to Philadelphia, and the other westward toward Darby, Pennsylvania. The ferry thereby came to connect Philadelphia to the Darby Road (now Woodland Avenue at 47th Street), which was part of the King's Highway, the main land route to Delaware, Baltimore, and the southern colonies. It remained virtually the only conduit to the city from points south until 1781, when the construction of a federal road connected the ferry environs to Market Street in what would become West Philadelphia.
It was still marked as "Lower Ferry" on a 1753 map, but it would soon take the name of its new proprietors, the brothers Robert and George Gray. George (1725–1800) owned large tracts of land near the ferry's eastern landing (in today's Grays Ferry neighborhood of South Philadelphia) and in 1787 became a signatory to Pennsylvania's ratification of the U.S. Constitution.
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