The “Restoring the George” bridge project has hit a milestone of completion, with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey announcing the last new steel suspender ropes on the 93-year-old George Washington Bridge.

The original ropes suspended from the bridge’s four main cables holding up the GW’s two roadway levels. Needless to say, replacing all 592 of them was a herculean challenge.

“What we’ve done by replacing the suspender ropes and the rehabilitation of the cables,” said Port Authority chief of construction Andrew Frisvold. “Things that have never been done before. And, the structural rehabilitation of the upper and lower levels is essentially rebuilt the bridge while not closing down traffic.

“The whole point of that is to extend the bridge by another century,” he said.

Work to replace the bridge’s original steel suspender ropes began in September, 2018 on the bridge’s north side. The painstaking process of inspecting and cleaning the main cables, as well as the replacement of each steel suspender rope on the bridge’s north side, was completed in 2022. Once new suspender ropes were in place and the main cable rehabilitation was complete, hi-tech acoustical monitoring and dehumidification systems were installed on the main cables — all while hundreds of thousands of cars pass over daily.

“If we choked this bridge, we choke most of the tri-state area,” said Frisvold. “That’s why it took so long to do it and costs so much money, because you have to dance around the traffic and build a lot of work to get around that.”

This project is part of a larger $2 billion plan to restore and repair the nearly century-old bridge, which is still a primary Hudson River crossing all these years later. The remainder of the repairs are scheduled to be finished by the end of 2029.

“The bridge was built to last about a century,” said Frisvold. “Here we are, 94-years-old. We want to duplicate that, we want to go another century. Not only is this bridge important transportation-wise to the tri-state area, but it’s iconic, it’s known around the world.”