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Gray's Ferry Bridge (more recently, Grays Ferry Bridge) has been the formal or informal name of several floating bridges and four permanent ones that have carried highway and rail traffic over the Schuylkill River in Philadelphia. The bridge today is a four-lane divided highway bridge, built in 1976, that carries Grays Ferry Avenue from the Grays Ferry neighborhood on the east bank over the river and the Northeast Corridor railroad tracks to the Southwest Philadelphia neighborhood of Kingsessing. An abandoned 1902 railroad bridge, the Philadelphia, Wilmington and Baltimore Railroad Bridge No. 1, sits just south of the highway bridge. ==Ferry== Before bridges crossed the Schuylkill, three ferries provided the main connections between Philadelphia and points west and south. Two of them crossed the river in or near the city limits: *Upper, or Sculls, Ferry, near the present-day Spring Garden Street Bridge. *Middle Ferry, near today's Market Street Bridge. The third, dubbed Lower Ferry, crossed south of the city proper and just south of the mouth of Mill Creek. It was likely established in 1673 or shortly thereafter by Benjamin Chambers, who was licensed to operate the ferry after Swedish settlers complained that they were blocked from passage on the Middle Ferry.〔(Report By Daughters of the American Revolution (1902) )〕〔(The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 46 )〕 In 1696, the government directed that two roads be laid out from either end of the Lower Ferry, also called Chambers' Ferry: one from the east landing north to Philadelphia, and the other westward toward Darby, Pennsylvania.〔 The ferry thereby came to connect Philadelphia to the Darby Road (now Woodland Avenue at 47th Street), which was part of the King's Highway, the main land route to Delaware, Baltimore, and the southern colonies. It remained virtually the only conduit to the city from points south until 1781, when the construction of a federal road connected the ferry environs to Market Street in what would become West Philadelphia.〔(The Building of West Philadelphia / 18th Century Landscape & Settlement Patterns )〕 It was still marked as "Lower Ferry" on a 1753 map,〔(1753 map ) in the Library of Congress〕 but it would soon take the name of its new proprietors, the brothers Robert and George Gray. George (1725–1800) owned large tracts of land near the ferry's eastern landing (in today's Grays Ferry neighborhood of South Philadelphia) and in 1787 became a signatory to Pennsylvania's ratification of the U.S. Constitution.〔〔(History Of The Friendly Sons Of St. Patrick And Of The Hibernian Society For The Relief Of Emigrants From Ireland, March 17, 1771-March 17, 1892 )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Gray's Ferry Bridge」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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