The USD 873 million bridge connects New York City’s Brooklyn and Queens boroughs and is the city’s first major bridge built from scratch since the Verrazzano Bridge in 1964.
The first span of the cable-stayed bridge was opened in 2017 to replace the original Kościuszko bridge built in 1939.
“I am very pleased, as is the Polish community in the US, that the Kosciuszko Bridge name was kept and that it will now be fully opened,” Poland’s consul in New York, Maciej Golubiewski, told Polish state news agency PAP on Wednesday.
Tadeusz Kościuszko led an insurrection against Russia in 1794, after the Second Partition of Poland between Tsarist Russia, Prussia and Austria.
During the American War of Independence, he served as a colonel in the Continental Army.
He designed and oversaw the construction of state-of-the-art fortifications, including those at West Point. Thomas Jefferson called him “the purest son of liberty I have ever known.”
Kościuszko died in Switzerland in 1817. A year later, his remains were brought to Poland and placed in a crypt at Wawel Cathedral in Kraków, a pantheon of Polish kings and national heroes.
(jh/pk)
Source: PAP