Let me show you something incredible. Walk down Harrison Street in Tribeca, west of Hudson, until the modern city falls away. The cobblestones get a little more uneven. The buildings get a little more brick. And then, if you look up, you will see it: a narrow copper-and-brick footbridge, two stories off the ground, arching across a sliver of an alley called Staple Street. It is one of the smallest, lowest, and most photogenic skybridges in Manhattan, and almost everyone walks right under it without noticing.
The locals call it the Staple Street Skybridge. The architects who built it in 1907 just called it a way to get the laundry across the street.
The Hospital That Used to Be Here
To understand the bridge, you have to understand what was happening at the corner of Hudson and Jay Streets in the 1890s. New York was a city of horse-drawn ambulances and warehouse fires, and the New York Hospital — already an institution by then — needed a downtown outpost to handle emergencies. In 1893, the hospital opened a building it called the House of Relief on the corner. It was, in the language of the time, an “emergency receiving station.” In ours, it was a Lower Manhattan ER.
The House of Relief building is still standing. Today the address is 67 Hudson Street, a handsome six-story Renaissance Revival pile in pale brick and limestone, with a stone seal carved above the entrance and a faded terra-cotta Red Cross shield still visible nearby, stamped with the initials N.Y.H. If you have ever passed it and assumed it was just another fancy Tribeca conversion, you were half right. It is fancy. It is also one of the only intact emergency-room buildings of its era left in the city.
Why the Bridge Exists
Hospitals in 1907 did not have the kind of in-house infrastructure modern medical centers do. They had stables, because the ambulances were pulled by horses. They had giant laundry operations, because everything got soaked in carbolic acid and boiled. And they had support buildings, because all of that took space the main hospital did not have.
So in 1907, the hospital built a three-story annex directly across the alley from the House of Relief — a stable on the ground floor for the ambulance horses, with a laundry on the upper floors. To move sheets, supplies, and staff between the buildings without sending them down to street level and back up again, the architecture firm of Robertson & Potter designed a small pedestrian bridge spanning Staple Street at the third-floor level. It is faced in copper that has gone the green of an antique penny, with arched windows and decorative brickwork that match the buildings on either end.
It was, in 1907, a piece of infrastructure. In 2026, it is one of the most photographed corners of Tribeca.
What Happened After the Hospital Left
The House of Relief closed as a hospital decades ago. New York Hospital eventually merged into what is now NewYork-Presbyterian, and the downtown emergency operation moved uptown. The two buildings on either side of Staple Street drifted into other lives — light industry, storage, eventually loft apartments — but the bridge stayed put, quietly connecting two pieces of property that no longer needed to be connected.
For most of the 20th century the bridge was a curiosity. Tribeca was a wholesale food district then, full of egg distributors and butter merchants on cobblestone streets, and the skybridge was just another piece of the neighborhood’s industrial bone structure. Then Tribeca became Tribeca. Artists moved into the lofts. The lofts became condos. The condos became some of the most expensive real estate in the city. And the bridge — still there, still copper-green, still impossibly small — became a landmark.
In recent years the skybridge has changed hands as part of the residential properties on either side, with the buildings and the connecting bridge marketed as a single unique compound. The bridge itself is private. You cannot walk across it. But you can stand under it, and you can look up, and you can think about the horses and the laundry and the city that built it.
The Walk That Tells the Whole Story
The best way to see the skybridge is on foot, and the best approach is from Hudson Street. Start at the corner of Hudson and Harrison. Look across at 67 Hudson — that is the old House of Relief, the original 1893 hospital. Walk west on Harrison about thirty feet and stop where the alley opens up to your left. That alley is Staple Street, one of the shortest named streets in Manhattan, only two blocks long, paved with original Belgian-block cobblestones.
Stand at the mouth of the alley and look up. The bridge is right there, framed by the old hospital on one side and the old stable-and-laundry building on the other. The light is best in the late afternoon, when the sun comes in low from the west and lights the copper. The street is usually quiet. Sometimes a delivery van will go through and you will get a sense of how narrow the alley really is. Sometimes a couple will walk by with a film camera. Sometimes you will be the only one there.
How to Visit
Where: Staple Street between Harrison and Jay Streets, Tribeca. The skybridge spans the alley between 67 Hudson Street and the three-story building at 9 Jay Street.
Nearest subway: Chambers Street on the 1, 2, 3 (about four blocks). Franklin Street on the 1 is also a short walk. The A, C, E at Canal Street works if you do not mind a slightly longer stroll through Tribeca.
Hours: The alley is a public street, viewable any time. The bridge itself is private property and not open to the public — this is a look-up-and-admire visit, not a walk-across one.
Cost: Free.
Combine with: A walk through Tribeca’s cast-iron blocks on Greenwich, Franklin, and White Streets — the neighborhood holds one of the largest collections of 19th-century cast-iron architecture in New York after SoHo.
Insider Tip: Most people walk down Hudson Street, glance at the alley, and keep moving. Locals know to stand on Jay Street and look back east — from that angle, the bridge sits perfectly framed against the brick on both sides, and you can see the original Red Cross shield mounted on the old House of Relief. Bring a camera with a slight zoom. Phones work, but the detail in the copper rewards a real lens.
Why It Still Matters
Tribeca’s skybridge is not Carnegie Hall. It is not the Woolworth Building. It is a piece of working infrastructure from a city that no longer exists — one that ran on horses and steam and hand-fed coal, where hospitals had stables and laundry was a serious architectural problem. It survived because nobody ever found a reason to tear it down, and because the buildings on either end kept finding new tenants who liked having a copper bridge in their floor plan.
Standing under it, you can feel the city in two layers at once. The cobblestones below. The condos above. The bridge — quiet, useless, beautiful — connecting them.
That is what hidden Tribeca looks like. Go find it.
