Hudson River Live Cam, Spuyten Duyvil, Bronx, NYC

Has the Spuyten Duyvil swing bridge opened for a boat yet, or is the next Amtrak train about to roll across? The Hudson River live cam answers both from the Bronx, New York City, where Spuyten Duyvil Creek meets the Hudson River at the northern tip of Manhattan. The camera looks over the low steel swing bridge that carries Amtrak, the high arch of the Henry Hudson Bridge a short way up the creek and, across the Hudson, the cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades. It is one of the NYC live cams on the site, pointed at the spot where the creek runs into the Hudson.

Why does the Spuyten Duyvil Bridge swing open?

The railroad bridge sits only about 5 feet above the water when it is closed, so it has to turn for almost anything with a cabin or a mast. Its 200-ton swing span rotates nearly 65 degrees on a central pier, leaving two channels about 100 feet wide. It opens more than 1,000 times a year, mostly in summer, for Circle Line sightseeing boats and pleasure craft heading between the Hudson and the Harlem River.

The current steel bridge dates from 1900. In June 2018 a floating crane lifted out its spans so Amtrak could repair damage from Hurricane Sandy and years of corrosion, and trains returned to Penn Station on September 4, 2018.

Boats and the bridge do not always get along. In 1966 a vessel struck the swing span and left it stuck open for two weeks, and a boat strike on May 29, 2016, held up trains along the whole Empire Corridor. Most openings, though, are routine: the Circle Line’s full-island cruise, which circles Manhattan in about two and a half hours, comes through here, so a swing on a summer afternoon usually means a tour boat is on its way to the Harlem River.

Which trains cross on the live stream?

About 30 trains a day use the single track, all of them Amtrak services on the Empire Connection between Penn Station and the Hudson Valley. Besides the Empire Service trains to Albany, the bridge carries long-distance runs such as the Maple Leaf to Toronto, the Adirondack to Montreal and the New York section of the Lake Shore Limited to Chicago.

If watching trains is the reason you are here, the site’s train cams follow other rail lines and stations around the world.

What is the big arch behind the swing bridge?

The Henry Hudson Bridge opened on December 12, 1936, carrying the Henry Hudson Parkway between Inwood in Manhattan and the Spuyten Duyvil neighborhood of the Bronx. David B. Steinman designed it, and its main span of 841 feet made it the longest plate girder arch and fixed arch bridge in the world when it opened. The bridge runs 2,208 feet in all and carried about 62,600 vehicles a day in 2016. The upper deck followed in May 1938, and today, according to MTA Bridges and Tunnels, the upper level carries northbound traffic and the lower level southbound.

Anyone checking Henry Hudson Bridge traffic today can see cars moving on the deck from this webcam, but the arch sits in the middle distance, 143 feet above the water, so it works as a quick look rather than a lane-by-lane traffic report.

The wooded slope at the Manhattan end of the arch is Inwood Hill Park, where a plaque marks the spot where, by tradition, Peter Minuit bought Manhattan in 1626.

Where does the creek meet the Hudson?

Spuyten Duyvil Creek links the Hudson with the Harlem River and closes off the northern end of Manhattan island. The Dutch name is usually translated as “spouting devil” or “in spite of the devil,” a nod to the strong currents here. The Harlem River Ship Canal, opened in 1895, straightened the route, and the MTA notes that Henry Hudson’s ship, the Half Moon, anchored near this spot in 1609.

The canal also left a geographic oddity a short way up the creek. Digging it cut the neighborhood of Marble Hill off from the rest of Manhattan, and when the old bend of Spuyten Duyvil Creek was filled in around 1914, Marble Hill ended up joined to the Bronx mainland while staying, on paper, part of the borough of Manhattan.

At the other end of the island, about 13 miles south, the New York webcam watches the towers of Lower Manhattan from Brooklyn Heights.

Across the river from the camera, the Palisades rise as cliffs up to about 500 feet high along the New Jersey shore, and in the late afternoon the sun drops behind them, lighting up the Hudson in front of the bridges. When it is dark over the river, our free live webcams cover places where the day is just starting.