For many people on Long Island, the slogan was "a bridge is a Sound idea." But for residents of the Connecticut shoreline, it was definitely "a bridge too far." In the end, it was the bridge that was never built.
The recent legislative battle over the Cross Sound Cable Co. plan to install an electric cable on the bottom of Long Island Sound for the 24 miles from New Haven to Brookhaven brings back memories of an earlier controversy. This one surrounded a series of plans to build a bridge and/or tunnel across the Sound.
The bridge project, which appears to have been permanently mothballed after a study in 1979, was not viewed as an engineer's pipe dream or an expensive public works boondoggle when it was proposed in the early 1960s. It was a serious proposal, one that generated public hearings on both sides of the Sound, and pitted New York leaders like former Gov. Nelson Rockefeller and builder Robert Moses against Connecticut officials like former Sen. Abraham Ribicoff and former Gov. Ella Grasso.
The plan, floated for the first time in 1957 by the Montauk Beach Company, was definitely something that could have been accomplished. That was proven in April 1964 with the opening of the 17.6-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel that connects the bottom of the Delmarva Peninsula with Virginia Beach. The Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, constructed over a 42-month period at a cost of more then $200 million and the lives of six workers, stands today as a key north-south link for the peninsula and anyone seeking a shortcut on the road south.
The Chesapeake Bay project may have been on the minds of New York officials and Long Island business interests in 1963 when they secured the formation of the Long Island Sound Tri-State Bridge Committee. This private organization put forth a grand scheme to construct a 23.8-mile bridge that would have begun at Orient Point on the island's North Fork and branched near Fishers Island into separate spans to Groton Long Point and Watch Hill, R.I. This $260 million vision gave way to a more "realistic" proposal from Clarence B. Sharp, a former Groton mayor and owner of Whaling City Dredge and Dock Corp., for an underwater tunnel connecting Orient Point with the Rocky Neck section of East Lyme.
Both proposals ran into determined opposition from Connecticut and Rhode Island residents led by Phillip D. Doran, a Democratic state representative from Berlin who owned a summer home on Groton Long Point. The plans had slid to the backburner by January 1966, when Rockefeller began the most serious push to build a bridge across the Sound.
The fact the bridge was largely a New York-driven show was evident in the way Rockefeller announced the project. There was a big public announcement in New York, but Connecticut Gov. John Dempsey received no information on the plan until two days later. Dempsey responded by forming a study committee "to find out what this is all about."
There were more than three years of studies, debate, information forums, and efforts by Ribicoff and U.S. Rep. Stewart McKinney to block federal funding for any more studies. Ribicoff, in an eloquent 1966 statement, urged people of both states "not to be so swayed by the cry for new structures, new highways and new bridges that we will destroy Connecticut's greatest assets, the beaches, the water, and the air itself."
The 1966-69 push eventually focused on two possible routes for the bridge, a 10-mile span from East Marion to Old Saybrook, or a 15-mile bridge from Port Jefferson to Bridgeport. The Old Saybrook route would have landed in the vicinity of Cornfield Point, where a 1.6-mile connector would take traffic to I-95, then known as the Connecticut Turnpike.
Ribicoff's opposition, which put him head-to-head with New York senators like Jacob Javits and Robert Kennedy, may have been key to blocking the Rockefeller bridge plan. The lack of a uniform depth on the bottom of the Sound brought doubt about the feasibility of the tunnel that was advocated by Sharp.
By 1973, his final year as New York's governor, Rockefeller had shifted focus to call for a much shorter bridge that would bypass Connecticut, running from Rye to Oyster Bay on Long Island. This plan floundered amid opposition from residents of the two towns and their representatives in Albany.
The last gasp for the bridge plan came in 1979, when New York Gov. Hugh Carey established a "tri-state advisory committee" to review proposals for a bridge across the Sound. Barbara Maynard, former first selectwoman of Old Saybrook, said she viewed this final study as a serious threat in a time of gasoline shortages and a push to develop the eastern end of Long Island.
"It was pretty serious, especially on the part of the people in Long Island," she said. "We did not want to be the town at the end of that bridge."
Maynard served as one of six Connecticut representatives on the study committee. The report completed in November 1979 called for expanding ferry service across Sound, but split on the idea of a bridge.
The committee's environmental impact task force determined the bridge was "neither desirable nor necessary." The economic impact subgroup questioned the cost of the bridge options, which were estimated at $640 million for the East Marion to Old Saybrook route and $720 million for a longer Riverhead to Guilford route. There was a sense the tolls levied on traffic for the crossing would never cover the costs of building and maintaining the bridge.
Maynard said she hopes the 40 year-old vision of a bridge over the Sound is forever shelved, regardless of the technological advances of the past 20 years.
"It's pretty obvious what a bridge would have done to Old Saybrook," she said.