Keeping your feet high above the Hudson

The walkway — 6,768 feet, or 1.28 miles — connects the small industrial city of Poughkeepsie, on the Hudson’s east bank, with the hamlet of Highland, on the west. Its ribbon-cutting last year marked the second incarnation of this structure, which started out as a railroad bridge in 1889, the same year the Eiffel Tower was erected. Then, too, the Poughkeepsie-Highland Railroad Bridge merited a superlative: the longest cantilevered and truss span bridge in the world. During World War II, when it had its heaviest use, 3,500 rail cars, most of them filled with US troops, thundered over it every day. A fire in 1974 ended the first chapter of the bridge’s history.

Like Manhattan’s High Line, another former railroad bridge-turned-linear park, this bridge owes its rebirth to preservation-minded citizens. In 1992, they organized to resurrect it for pedestrians and cyclists. (The bridge now forms part of the Hudson Valley Rail Trail.) The nonprofit Walkway Over the Hudson eventually bought the structure and raised private and public money to renovate it, paving the deck with 973 concrete panels weighing up to 15 tons apiece. New York State now manages it as a State Historic Park.

The walkway lacks the High Line’s high design — no artful benches or plantings interrupt the broad deck. (The organization’s website says that seating and other amenities will be added as financing allows.) This experience is all about the views beyond the stout steel railings — and the public is loving it.

In the first three months after opening, about 400,000 people (an average of 4,500 people a day) came to sample the scenery. Even on this crisp Wednesday morning, a surprising number and variety of people have stepped out: walkers of retirement age zipped into windbreakers, mothers pushing strollers, dogs tugging their humans, bare-legged young runners, and the occasional helmeted cyclist. But the deck is far from crowded, and it’s easy to imagine that hundreds of people could be up here at once without rubbing elbows.