Lovers looking for a scenic spot to celebrate Valentine's Day could head to Central Park's iconic Bow Bridge, but more than a century ago New Yorkers might have headed to one of the city's romantic, secluded "kissing bridges."
Here's everything you need to know if you want to recapture the romance of days gone past:
1. It was once considered good manners for men to kiss ladies while they traveled over bridges.
Tradition said that male travelers approaching the kissing bridges that dotted New York's roads in the late 18th and early 19th centuries were supposed to kiss their female companions as they crossed.
Rev. Mr. Burnaby, an English archdeacon traveling in New York whose diary was quoted in the Morning Chronicle on April 19, 1803, wrote that "it is the etiquette for every gentleman in company with a lady to salute his fair companion when upon it.”
An illustration from 1892 of a kissing bridge at 50th Street and Second Avenue. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)
2. The kissing bridges were all over Manhattan.
Creeks and streams crisscrossed 18th-century New York, making small bridges a necessity for getting around by horse, carriage, cart or foot.
Covered bridges popped up all over the city, many of them built in secluded areas that offered travelers extra privacy to steal a smooch.
An issue of The People's Friend & Daily Advertiser from Feb. 19, 1807, mentions a kissing bridge on the post road to Albany — which is present-day Broadway — although we weren't able to pin down its exact location.
The kissing bridge at Chatham Square is easier to pinpoint, even more than 200 years later. It stood between East Broadway and Oliver Street in present-day Chinatown over a small creek that led to Collect Pond (now the site of Collect Pond Park).
Another bridge was located about five miles out of the 18th-century city at what would later become 50th Street and Second Avenue.
A nostalgic New York Times article from July 17, 1898, mentioned kissing bridges at 32nd Street just west of Fifth Avenue; 33rd Street and Lexington Avenue over Kip's Run; and 54th Street and First Avenue that had all since been demolished.
The article also alluded to other places where "the impatient maid may already purse her lips for payment of toll," but no other specific cross streets were listed.
3. Kissing bridges were probably around before the U.S. became a country.
The first mention of kissing bridges in the city that DNAinfo New York was able to find with the help of New York Public Library librarians was in 1797 — meaning they were probably around at, if not before, the start of the American Revolution in 1776.
On May 6, 1797, the Weekly Museum ran an advertisement looking for a renter for the season of a 10 acre lot "through which the Kissing bridge brook runs.”
4. Kissing bridges helped sell bedroom sets.
The old adage that "sex sells" seems to have held true at the turn of the century when an enterprising store owner exploited the memory of all those kisses stolen on the bridge at Chatham Square to sell furniture.
Cowperthwait & Sons placed an ad in The Evening Telegram celebrating the 99th anniversary of the store, which was established near the old kissing bridge "where the lovers, after they were married, bought their beds and chairs."
The ad promised to give contemporary shoppers the "same gracious treatment they did to the lovers of the olden days."
5. The kissing bridges — and romance? — died in Midtown.
An illustration of the last kissing bridge in New York City. (Courtesy of the New York Public Library)
Several publications wrote that the last kissing bridges to survive in New York City was the one at 50th Street and Second Avenue.
This bridge was where “our grandmothers and grandfathers went out sleighing, and wrapped in furs and blankets, did their courting and kissing," according to the flowery author of an article from Dec. 9, 1865, in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
It was demolished in 1860 according to the article from Dec. 9, 1865, in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper.
Now it's home to — among other things — a Starbucks.
