The Passaic River

The Passaic River long served commerce, transportation, and recreation, with movable bridges spanning it from Newark Bay to Paterson to allow large vessels to pass. Since European settlement along its banks in the late seventeenth century, ferries and schooners were early commercial craft on the river, and in the nineteenth century steamboats carried manufactured goods and raw materials between Paterson’s mills, Newark Bay, and New York City, helping drive New Jersey’s industrial development. Barges and ocean-going vessels were common before 1950, but river traffic declined as improved roads and highways developed, though tugboats and tankers still occasionally navigate the river. The river also became a major recreational destination from the end of the Civil War into the early twentieth century, attracting swimmers, picnickers, sightseers, and boaters, and it was renowned for championship rowing on the “Passaic Course,” where crowds watched clubs such as the Nereid, Passaic, and Triton Boat Clubs compete. Rowing declined sharply by the early 1900s because industrial pollution made the river largely inaccessible, then revived in the 1920s and 1930s through cleanup efforts by the Passaic Valley Sewage Commission, and an active rowing community still continues that tradition. Among the river’s movable crossings, the Rutherford Avenue Bridge, a Pratt truss bascule draw bridge, was completed in 1870 as the first bridge connecting Rutherford with the Delawanna section of Clifton; the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad completed the 439-foot Lyndhurst drawbridge, a swing bridge, in 1900; and the Route 3 Bridge, completed in 1949, replaced the Rutherford Avenue Bridge. That Route 3 Bridge was a seven-span, 699-foot-long, 76-foot-wide, double-leaf bascule simple trunnion movable bridge with a twin double-leaf main span, two flanking spans, and four approach spans. Its bascule corners had flat-roofed moderne-style reinforced-concrete operator’s houses, its approach spans had railings with moderne-style posts, and it was unusual for its internal rack, a feature found on only one other bridge in New Jersey. It was found eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places in 1997, was replaced in 2014, and stone from its channel piers was later salvaged.

Rutherford, New Jersey · United States