The nowadays Quixotic notion of bridging Long Island Sound surfaced in the news this week, with Newsday picking up on such a flare in the Connecticut legislature. The scheme in question would link Bridgeport with Kings Park, N.Y., and the Sunken Meadow Parkway through western Suffolk County. It would have a ballpark cost of $50 billion and isn’t going to happen for that and other reasons. But the item did stir memories of when such a bridge–and much farther east, touching down in the Wading River hamlet of Riverhead town–was one of multiple such crossings seriously considered by state planners. (Another idea was for a span to Orient on the North Fork of Long Island with subsidiary links through Shelter Island to what became “the Hamptons.”) An element in all these visions, which were alive into the 1970s and still floated by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in 2017, was that Long Island’s East End needed a direct connection to lower New England. In today’s world, the aim would be to alleviate congestion on limited east-west roads at peak times or in an emergency. But in earlier decades, the hope of some was to bring more mainlanders to enjoy the ocean splendor of what was then a rural Suffolk County. (At the time, before the widespread installation of cable television, eastern Suffolk was much attuned to Connecticut, where it got its broadcast signals.) This was an era of extensive motorway construction, and fast routes to the shore were on the planning boards–one such stretch, Suffolk Route 111 that connects Hamptons traffic from the Long Island Expressway to the Sunrise Highway, was originally to go on to Westhampton Beach. However, wealth on the South Fork took off and preservation of its remaining character displaced development promotion as governing orthodoxy. The roads–and the bridges–receded into remains of the drafting tables.
Long Island Sound bridge proposal gets a hearing in Connecticut – Newsday
Tim W. Ferguson 