Brielle Road Bridge over the Glimmer Glass

About this property

The Glimmer Glass Bridge is a county owned bridge in Monmouth County, New Jersey, United States. It carries traffic from Brielle Road over the Glimmer Glass, a navigable tidal inlet of the Manasquan River, between Manasquan and Brielle. It has also been on the National Register of Historic Places, since 2008. Due to its age, Commercial vehicles cannot be driven over it. It also allows Bicycles and pedestrians to walk on the wooden sidewalk. The Glimmer Glass Bridge was built in 1898. It is a cable lift bascule bridge, using a rolling counterweight design and is technologically and historically significant as the only example of its type in New Jersey. It may also be the only example in the eastern half of the United States. "...although the principle behind the design is not entirely new, the Berry's Creek Bridge is the first application of this system of counter weighing for a structure of this magnitude." The principle is to use a curved track and rolling counterweights where the work expended in raising the leaf is equal to the energy released by the falling counterweight. The toe end of the movable span is linked by cables to cylindrical rolling counterweights. The connecting cable passes over a tower column with a curved track. Moving the counterweights along the curved track thus raises or lowers the bridge. The work expended in raising the leaf is equal to the energy released by the falling counterweight. The toe end of the moveable span is linked by cables to cylindrical rolling counterweights. The rolling counterweight single-leaf bascule bridge with a deck girder movable leaf is the only example of the late 19th-century bridge type in the state of New Jersey and possibly the entire country. It was, at the time, a popular design for railroads in New Jersey for spanning canals. The bridge has been rebuilt several times. The wood tower column and track were redone in 1957 and 1971, and the steel grid deck on the ca. 1950 deck girder movable span was installed in 1962. However, the integrity of the original design has been maintained and it operates in the original manner. In 2014, the bridge was damaged by an overweight truck. The county has since considered to replace it with a modern structure; the plan has been met with protest. The Glimmer Glass Bridge is located in a salt marsh lowland surrounded by what was once a seasonal community of small bungalows and cottages. It connects the historic shore towns of Manasquan and Brielle on Brielle Road with the mainland over Glimmer Glass Creek/Watson Creek to Brielle by way of Fisk Avenue. In both towns, however, the structures have been modified and new homes have been built in Manasquan and neighboring Brielle, leaving the area near the bridge not eligible for historic district status as determined by the State of New Jersey.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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