The bids are in on the Henry Hudson Bridge's walkway job. MTA Construction & Development opened eight bids on September 21, 2023 for contract HH-07W — widening the bridge's lower-level sidewalk into a real multi-use path and rehabilitating the upper-level north abutment and retaining walls. Defoe Corp came in apparent low at $18,477,819. The agency had advertised the job at $10 million to $50 million, so the low number landed comfortably inside its own range.

The top of the tab was a footrace. El Sol Contracting/ES II Enterprises JV took second at $19,459,150 — 5.3 percent above Defoe — and Triumph Construction Corp was third at $19,465,097, so close to El Sol the two bids nearly touch. Navillus Contracting bid $21,348,000 and Paul J. Scariano $21,805,000 in the middle of the field. From there the tab climbed through American Structural Works at $23,456,789 and JRCRUZ Corp at $27,031,277.55 to Zaman Construction's $43,719,091 at the top. Three bidders bunched tight at the bottom says the market mostly read this job the same way; the top of the tab says not everybody did.

What the apparent low signed up for, straight from the agency's solicitation notice: move and replace the concrete roadway barrier on the lower level and the parkway's southbound west shoulder, then hang a steel cantilever structure off the bridge and the west retaining wall at the south approach to carry a 10-foot-wide multi-use path. Build a new mid-block pedestrian crossing with ADA-compliant ramps. Replace the lower-level safety fencing. Strengthen the Kappock exit wall, the north abutment wall and its west wingwall. Recoat the lower-level deck forms, replace the north-abutment roadway joints, and handle the drainage, lighting, fiber-optic and grading work that comes with pushing a sidewalk wider. MTA advertised it as an A+B contract — price and schedule bid together — with a 16-month term, 100 percent MTA funding, and goals of 15 percent MBE, 15 percent WBE and 6 percent SDVOB.

Who this serves: the Henry Hudson has tied the top of Manhattan to Spuyten Duyvil since 1936, when it opened as the longest plate girder arch bridge in the world — the second deck went on within eighteen months. The upper level runs northbound, the lower level southbound, and trucks are never allowed. By the MTA's count, roughly 71,500 customers a day rely on the crossing, which sits between the residential blocks of Spuyten Duyvil and Riverdale on the Bronx side and Inwood Hill Park — Manhattan's last natural woodland — on the other. For anyone on foot or on a bike, the link between those neighborhoods was a narrow lower-level walk. This contract is the fix: a path wide enough to share, with ramps a wheelchair can actually use, on a crossing the MTA's own bike plan had marked for a shared-use path by 2024.

The standard caveat applies to this record: an apparent low is not an award. MTA C&D checks the math, the paperwork and the bidder's standing before anything gets signed, and the tab carries these bids as under review — not yet an award.

The bridge itself tells you how the story ended. The MTA announced the new walkway open in December 2024 — on time and within budget, by the agency's telling — completing a fully accessible bike-and-pedestrian route between Spuyten Duyvil and Inwood Hill Park. The tab above is the day that work was priced.