Roosevelt and La Guardia open the Triborough Bridge; twenty years of argument end at $60.3 million

By the summer of 1936, New York City had spent twenty years arguing about a bridge nobody could agree how to pay for. On July 11, workers finally opened the Triborough Bridge, a $60.3 million complex of three spans linking Manhattan, Queens, and the Bronx across the Harlem and East Rivers. President Franklin D. Roosevelt joined Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Governor Herbert Lehman, PWA administrator Harold Ickes, and Postmaster General James A. Farley for the dedication, with Robert Moses serving as master of ceremonies, capping the largest PWA project in the eastern United States and one of the largest public works projects of the Depression. In its first week alone, 242,000 vehicles crossed it…