“We did our celebration in the good weather of the first week of October,” Mr. Schneider said. “I don’t want to be seen as a spoilsport, that we did it when it was convenient for us. We had 100 years to plan this. But the bridge wasn’t completed on Dec. 31. He got the people across and he said, ‘Now finish the damn bridge.’ ”

Image New York has spent $830 million repairing the bridge, known as the Rodney Dangerfield of the city’s bridges, since the ’80s. Credit... David Frieder

The Times expressed that idea a bit differently. “Much still remains to be done on the Manhattan Bridge,” it said in the article about Mr. McClellan’s crossing on New Year’s Eve, “before it will be a finished product of engineering skill.”

Once it was completed, it became the Rodney Dangerfield of the city’s bridges. “Does it have a Roebling?” Mr. Holzer said, referring to the family that masterminded the Brooklyn Bridge. “Does it have Tony Bennett on the other end in Astoria, the way the 59th Street Bridge does? No. It’s the bridge between the Brooklyn Bridge and the 59th Street Bridge, two famous icons that dwarf it.”

The historian Thomas R. Winpenny wrote in “Manhattan Bridge: The Troubled Story of a New York Monument” (Canal History and Technology Press, 2004), that it was “a figurative disaster in which repairing, reconstructing and maintaining the Manhattan Bridge became a black hole capable of devouring hundreds of millions of dollars with only modest results.”

The city has spent about $830 million repairing the bridge since the 1980s. Subways had to be rerouted for years in the 1990s, and the lower roadway was closed for a year starting in the fall of 2007. The Department of Transportation is awarding a contract for a $150 million project to replace its vertical suspension cables.

“It was poorly designed, but it’s beautiful,” said Dave Frieder, a photographer who is assembling a coffee-table book about the bridges in and around New York.

One of its designers was Leon S. Moisseiff, whose later projects were either revered  the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, between Philadelphia and Camden, N.J., for example  or reviled, a category that includes the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington. The latter did the twist  a very bad idea for a bridge. Slammed by a blast of wind one morning in 1940, it danced so hard it collapsed.