The Bowery boys episode 424, Kashushko, the man, the bridge, the legend.

Hey, it's the Bowery boys.

Hey! Hi there, welcome to the Bowery Boys. This is Greg Young, kicking off a brand new year of shows.

And since we are entering our 17th year of podcasting, if you can believe that, and with

Tom still away on holiday break, I'm going to get a little experimental and do something that I've never done on the show.

And that is, read some romantic verse by Lord Byron.

Poland or which the avenging angel passed, but left thee as he found thee, still a waste,

forgetting all thy still enduring claim, thy lauded people an extinguished name.

Thy sigh for freedom, thy long flowing tear, that sound that crashes in the tyrants ear, Kashushko.

The English poet is of course referring to the Polish national hero

Today's Kashushko. However if Lord Byron had been from Queens

he would have been referring to the Kashushko Bridge and might have prefaced the bridge's name with a curse word.

The original Kashushko Bridge opened in 1939 and its glamorous and long, long overdue replacement opened in two phases

in 2017 and 2019.

The bridge is the hyphen in the Brooklyn Queens Expressway as it

literally connects Brooklyn to Queens over Newtown Creek. That 3.5 mile creek that empties into the East River.

In Queens, the approaches to the bridge slice through Calvary Cemetery.

On the Brooklyn side, the bridge intervenes between the neighborhoods of Greenpoint

and Williamsburg, or East Williamsburg, and some of you might even just call it Bushwick.

Let's not get too particular quite yet, for at one point a long time ago,

all of these neighborhoods were actually a part of Bushwick.

The Kashushko bridge has traditionally been known in two respects.

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