Comment by ghaff

It's not especially near 110th Street :-) It crosses from 173rd Street in Manhattan to 170th Street in the Bronx. Washington Heights has seen a fair bit of urban renewal and there's also been work on the river paths etc. on the Bronx side. The short answer is that neither side of the river is especially rich and there probably wasn't much impetus from anyone to reopen the bridge and do corresponding park and path revitalization while they were in the midst of fairly serious urban decay which they were for a long time.