Kosciuszko Bridge

The Kosciuszko Bridge spans the Newtown Creek and connects Brooklyn and Queens via the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. The first bridge in this location, the Meeker Avenue Bridge, opened in 1803. The old truss bridge in this video opened in August 1939. On September 22, 1940, months after the invasion of Poland by Germany, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia formally renamed this bridge after Tadeusz Kościuszko, a Polish-Lithuanian military engineer who served as a colonel in the Continental army during the American Revolution and led the Polish bid for independence against Russia in 1794. In 2017, when the truss bridge was replaced by a cable-stayed bridge span, the main span of the truss bridge was lowered and shipped on the Newtown Creek and the East River to New Jersey for recycling.

Object:

Kosciuszko Bridge

Body of Water

Newtown Creek

About the Artist

Birgit Rathsmann grew up in Germany and Indonesia. She is a filmmaker, animator and artist. She has worked as a free-lance commercial motion designer for TV channels like USA, SyFy, NBC, CBC, WeTV, and has animated title sequence for several feature films. Over the last few years, Birgit created and directed animations in collaboration with a number of comedians including Lorelei Ramirez, Mary Houlihan, Tim Platt and Ikechukwu Ufomado. She directed a documentary film about female martial arts heroes and directors in films from Hong Kong. She created an exhibition from 22 artist responses to the 1977 jail death of the Baader Meinhof Group at a Chelsea Gallery. Malpaso, an exhibition she created with Alenjandro Almaza Pereda and Rick Karr, investigates a submerged church in Chiapas, Mexico and was at The Clemente on New York’s Lower East Side in the spring of 2019.