Snøhetta and sbp Replace a 1908 Arch at Watkins Glen with a Steel Half-Arch Footbridge

Some of the hardest commissions in architecture are also the smallest. Sentry Bridge at Watkins Glen State Park measures 46 feet and roughly 30 square metres of deck, yet it replaces an arch bridge that had stood since 1908 at the entrance to one of New York's most visited gorges. The New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation brought in Snøhetta and the structural engineers schlaich bergermann partner (sbp) to design its successor. That is a lot of expertise for a crossing you can walk in under a minute, and we think the scale of the team is justified.

What makes the project worth your attention is not novelty. The design team chose not to compete with the gorge or erase the memory of the old arch. Instead, they turned the arch into a lightweight half-arch cantilever that springs from the stronger shale on the north side. It is a structural argument stated plainly: put the load where the rock can take it, and let the rest of the bridge hover. Around that move sits a careful layer of stone, bronze, timber and board-form concrete that ties the new steel into a park built over almost two centuries of successive bridges.

A Half-Arch That Trusts the North Wall

Seen from the creek bed in low evening light, the bridge reads as a single thin stroke across the shale. The profile still refers to the 1908 arch, but only half of it. By anchoring the steel to the north face and cantilevering toward the south, sbp's engineering cuts down the mass at the weaker abutment and makes the structure look closer to a gesture than a piece of infrastructure.

On the deck, the slatted steel guardrails throw striped shadows across the walking surface. The effect is pleasant, but it also does real work: the slats keep the views down into the gorge open while meeting the safety demands of a heavily used public trail. Visitors lean on the rail because the rail invites them to.

Bronze and Timber Where Hands Meet Steel

The material palette is chosen for a wet, freezing, spray-soaked climate: stainless steel for the structure, bronze for the detailing, and wood for the handrails. The interesting decision is how these meet. A bronze end cap finishes the timber rail above the metal balustrade, and in another detail a steel hinge bracket is bolted straight into raw rock. The rail follows the gorge rather than asking the gorge to follow it.

Timber is a practical choice at hand height, because it stays warmer and friendlier to touch than steel in a cold gorge. Bronze will darken and patinate, which should help the bridge settle into the dark shale over time instead of staying conspicuously new.

Through the Rock: Stairs, Tunnel and Landing

The bridge is only one piece of the entrance sequence. Visitors climb rough-cut stone stairs through a tunnel toward a green opening, then descend rock-walled passages guided by wood-topped metal handrails. The handrail detailing carries straight through from the bridge, so the whole route reads as one coherent piece of design rather than a new object dropped into an old trail.

At the landings, curved dry-stacked stone walls meet board-form concrete. Using local stone here is the right call: it lets the new work sit beside the park's historic stonework without copying it, while the concrete makes clear what is new.

Framing the Falls

Watkins Glen draws people for its waterfalls, and the Gorge Trail that the bridge connects to is built around them. At Cavern Cascade, the stacked stone retaining wall and timber railing put visitors close to the water. A stair descends behind the fall, and groups across the gorge watch others pass through it, so people on the trail become part of the view for everyone else.

One small gesture stands out: a square opening cut into a stone wall holds a layered terrain model, with the real gorge and waterfall visible beyond. The interpretation is built directly into the masonry, putting the abstract map and the actual landscape in the same frame. It is a smart, economical piece of wayfinding.

One Lift into a Remote Gorge

Getting material into and out of the gorge is difficult, and that fact shaped the bridge as much as any aesthetic decision. The team chose to assemble the structure off-site and lower it into the cleft in one piece, with a crane overhead and a boom lift working from the stream below. A prefabricated steel cantilever suits that method well: fewer joints made in place, less time in a sensitive landscape, and better control over finish quality.

From below, the underside shows how slim the result is. The half-arch, slatted railing and timber handrail form a single lean profile against the summer foliage, and nothing about it suggests the logistics involved in getting it there.

Plans and Drawings

The site drawings place the bridge within the longer arrival path, which runs from a small tower down to the span and the park plaza. The fine contour lines show how tightly the route is threaded between rock edges.

The sections are where the project explains itself. The bridge sits inside the rock cleft with the waterfall beneath it, and the stair-cut tunnel entrance opens on the opposite face. The drawings show a bridge and tunnel designed as one sequence.

The spiral tunnel drawings show curved stairs and stepped ramps wrapping a central concrete core, with handrails fixed directly to the rough rock wall. It is a compact vertical solution for a site that has no spare room.

Why This Project Matters

Watkins Glen has always built its bridges with the materials and methods of the time, and Sentry Bridge accepts that inheritance honestly. It does not imitate the 1908 arch or reject it. It reduces the arch to the half that the geology actually supports, and builds it in the stainless steel, bronze and prefabrication that a remote, wet site in 2026 calls for. This kind of continuity is harder to achieve than either replication or rupture.

For anyone working on infrastructure in protected landscapes, the lesson is in the coordination. Structure, construction logistics, material weathering and the touch of a handrail were all resolved by the same team, toward the same goal. The result is a small bridge that could plausibly become the park's emblem, which was part of the brief, and it earns that role through restraint rather than spectacle.

Sentry Bridge by Snøhetta and schlaich bergermann partner (sbp), Watkins Glen State Park, Watkins Glen, United States. Area: 30 m². Completed 2026. Photography by Barrett Doherty.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.