3. Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge (Manhattan)

Woody Allen’s love for New York City is aptly captures in the movie Manhattan when, while sitting on a park bench under the 59th Street Bridge (Queensboro Bridge) with Mary Wilkie (Diane Keaton) Woody Allen’s character Isaac proclaims, “This is really a great city. I don’t care what anyone says. It’s really a knockout, you know?” Perhaps it is because of this love for the City that he opted to shoot the movie’s most memorable scene—which was also on the movie poster—at 5 a.m. at Sutton Place, a secluded, tucked-away little park on the waterfront of the East River.

Completed in 1909, the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge (the bridge was officially renamed from simply Queensboro Bridge in 2011) is a double cantilever bridge that was the largest cantilever bridge in North America, before being surpassed in 1917 by the Quebec Bridge. The bridge originally contained two pedestrian walks and two elevated railways tracked on the upper deck, while the lower deck comprised of four motor traffic lanes and two trolley lanes, which are now the pedestrian and biking lanes.

The bridge is featured in numerous pictures, and some literature, including The Great Gatsby where, while Jay Gatsby and Nick Carraway traverse the bridge Nick says, “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its first wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty in the world”.