The Irondequoit Bay Bridge is on NY 104. This one is a seasonal swing bridge, open year-round but in two different senses of the word. In the summer season, it's "left open" so that boat traffic can pass between the Bay and Lake Ontario. In the winter off-season, the bridge is opened to vehicular traffic. I was here in summer, so you get the bridge while it's open and not while it's open.


A complete circuit of the bridge from the west side. The sidewalks are constructed to allow access to both sides of the closed bridge in the summer - you walk right across the bridge deck to get from the EB side to the WB side - so that people can fish or sightsee. In the winter, you end up with a quarter-circle sidewalk that goes nowhere, the one that provides access to the EB sidewalk in summer.


The little marker signals that this is the beginning of Monroe CR 8.


The entire swing span is steel grate, lightweight but sturdy and requiring no drainage appurtenances. However, the part of the deck directly above the swing machinery is filled with concrete to handle the stresses.


The swing machinery underneath the bridge. It takes about 5 hours to swing the span, but most of that is setting up and winding down. If the bridge swung from the middle instead of the west side, besides the fact that there would be no good boating channel, there would not be much decrease in actual swing time. If anything, because the machinery would be less heavy-duty, there may be savings in set-up/wind-down time.


The view to the north (Lake Ontario) and east (Town of Webster). Paths go down both jetties, even out to the lighthouse, so there are more fishing opportunities there when the bridge is swung shut for the winter.


Irondequoit Bay, with the Irondequoit Bay Bridge (NY 104). There are special speed limit signs for boats that are decidedly not the same as the ones for cars. The interpretation of these signs is 25 MPH, whereas boat signs don't have "speed limit" on them and are intended to be in knots. It's an issue of land miles versus nautical miles, not that we haven't had hundreds of years to pick one as the standard.

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