Photo of the Day: More on ‘New Bridge,’ River Edge NJ

I can still remember the day I took this photo last month. It was a Sunday afternoon, and awfully cold—so much so that, when a friend called and spoke, at some length (surely thinking I was in a warm place), I had to cut him short, because my teeth were chattering and I could hardly hold the cellphone any more. In the last few weeks, as we’ve been battered by one snowstorm after another, I would have regarded any attempt to get outside such as this one as a distinct improvement over what I was now facing: snow so heavy it largely confined me to my street, and ice so treacherous that just walking a few feet could cause a fall.

Anyway…back to this site. I couldn’t take the photo of the bridge from where I wanted to take it, Historic New Bridge Landing, because much of that area was closed off. So I had to circle around and take it from several yards past Sanzari’s New Bridge Inn, in adjacent New Milford.

This was not the first “New Bridge” on the site. That one, a wooden crossing, dated back to 1745, and provided the escape route for George Washington in the critical fall of 1776. This pedestrian-only “New Bridge” is, in fact, 125 years old now, and is still, according to a sign near it, the oldest such iron swing-bridge in New Jersey. It’s now on the New Jersey and National Registers of Historic Places.

This might not be one of those picturesque Vermont covered bridges, but it has its own charms, and is a nice oasis from the swirling traffic and overdevelopment just a few streets away from this corner of northeastern New Jersey.