The Bridge Read online

  And finally, when all was done, and months after the last ironworker had left the scene for a challenge elsewhere, the bridge would be opened, bands would march across, ribbons would be cut, pretty girls would smile from floats, politicians would make speeches, everyone would applaud—and the engineers would take all the bows.

  And the ironworker would not give a damn. He will do his boasting in bars. And anyway, he will know what he has done, and he would somehow not feel comfortable standing still on a bridge, wearing a coat and tie, showing sentimentality.

  In fact, for a long time afterward he will probably not even think much about the bridge. But then, maybe four or five years later, a sort of ramblin' fever in reverse will grip him. It might occur while he is driving to another job or driving off to a vacation; but suddenly it will dawn on him that a hundred or so miles away stands one of his old boom towns and bridges. He will stray from his course, and soon he will be back for a brief visit: Maybe it is St. Ignace, and he is gazing up at the Mackinac Bridge; or perhaps it's San Francisco, and he is admiring the Golden Gate; or perhaps (some years from now) he will be back in Brooklyn staring across the sea at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

  Today he will doubt the possibility, most of the boomers will, but by 1968 or 769 he probably will have done it: He may be in his big car coming down from Long Island or up from Alanhattan, and he will be moving swiftly with all the other cars on the Belt Parkway, but then, as they approach Bay Ridge, he will slow up a bit and hold his breath as he sees, stretching across his windshield, the Verrazano—its span now busy and alive with auto traffic, bumper-to-bumper, and nobody standing on the cables now but a few birds.

  Then he will cut his car toward the right lane, pulling slowly off the Belt Parkway into the shoulder, kicking up dust, and motorists in the cars behind will yell out the window, "Hey, you idiot, watch where you're driving," and a woman may nudge her husband and say, "Look out, dear, the man in that car looks drunk."

  In a way, she will be right. The boomer, for a few moments, will be under a hazy, heady influence as he takes it all in—the sights and sounds of the bridge he remembers—hearing again the rattling and clanging and Hard Nose Murphy's angry voice; and remembering, too, the cable-spinning and the lifting and Kelly saying, "Up on seven, easy now, easy"; and seeing again the spot where Gerard McKee fell, and where the clamps slipped, and where the one-thousand-pound casting was dropped; and he will know that on the bottom of the sea lies a treasury of rusty rivets and tools.

  The boomer will watch silently for a few moments, sitting in his car, and then he will press the gas pedal and get back on the road, joining the other cars, soon getting lost in the line, and nobody will ever know that the man in this big car one day had knocked one thousand rivets into that bridge, or had helped lift four hundred tons of steel, or that his name is Tatum, or Olson, or Iannielli, or Jacklets, or maybe Hard Nose Murphy himself.

  Anyway, this is how, in the spring of 1964, Bob Anderson felt—he was a victim of ramblin' fever. He was itchy to leave the Verrazano job in Brooklyn and get to Portugal, where he was going to work on a big new suspension span across the Tagus River.

  "Oh, we're gonna have a ball in Portugal," Anderson was telling the other ironworkers on his last working day on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. "The country is absolutely beautiful, we'll have weekends in Paris . . . you guys gotta come over and join me."

  "We will Bob, in about a month," one said.

  "Yeah, Bob, I'll sure be there," said another. "This job is finished as far as I'm concerned, and I got to get the hell out. . . ."

  On Friday, June 19, Bob Anderson shook hands with dozens of men on the Verrazano and gave them his address in Portugal, and that night many of them joined him for a farewell drink at the Tamaqua Bar in Brooklyn. There were about fifty ironworkers there by 10 P.M. They gathered around four big tables in the back of the room, drank whiskey with beer chasers, and wished Anderson well. Ace Cowan was there, and so was John Drilling (he had just been promoted back to pusher after three hard months in Whitey Miller's gang), and so were several other boomers who had worked with Anderson on the Alackinac Bridge in Michigan between 1955 and 1957.

  Everyone was very cheerful that night. They toasted Anderson, slapping him on the back endlessly, and they cheered when he promised them a big welcoming binge in Portugal. There were reminiscing and joke-telling, and they all remembered with joy the incidents that had most infuriated Hard Nose Murphy, and they recalled, too, some of the merry moments they had shared nearly a decade ago while working on the Alackinac. The party went on beyond midnight, and then, after a final farewell to Anderson, one by one they staggered out.

  Prior to leaving for Lisbon, Bob Anderson, with his wife, Rita, and their two children, packed the car and embarked on a brief trip up to St. Ignace, Michigan. It was in St. Ignace, during the Alackinac Bridge job, that Bob Anderson had met Rita. She still had parents and many friends there, and that was the reason for the trip—that and the fact that Bob Anderson wanted to see again the big bridge upon which he had worked between 1955 and 1957.

  A few days later he was standing alone on the shore of St. Ignace, gazing up at the Mackinac Bridge from which he had once come bumping down along a cable, clinging to a disconnected piece of catwalk for 1,800 feet, and he remembered how he'd gotten up after, and how everybody then had said he was the luckiest boomer on the bridge.

  He remembered a great many other things, too, as he walked quietly at the river's edge. Then, ten minutes later, he slowly walked back toward his car and drove to his mother-in-law's to join his wife, and later they went for a drink at the Nicolet Hotel bar, which had been boomers' headquarters nine years ago and where he had won that thousand dollars shooting craps in the men's room.

  But now, at forty-two years of age, all this was behind him. He was very much in love with Rita, his third wife, and he had finally settled down with her and their two young children. They both looked forward to the job in Portugal—and the possibility of tragedy there never could have occurred to them.

  In Portugal while looking for a house, the Andersons stayed at the Tivoli Hotel in Lisbon. Bob Anderson's first visit to the Tagus River Bridge was on June 17. At that time the men were working on the towers, and the big derricks were hoisting up fifty-ton steel sections that would fit into the towers. Anderson apparently was standing on the pier when, as one fiftyton unit was four feet off the ground, the boom buckled and suddenly the snapped hoisting cable whipped against him with such force that it sent him crashing against the pier, breaking his left shoulder and cracking open his skull, damaging his brain. Nobody saw the accident, and the bridge company could only guess what had happened. Bob Anderson remained unconscious all day and night and two months later he was still in a coma, unable to recognize Rita or to speak. Flis booming days were over, the doctors said.

  When word got back to the Verrazano in Brooklyn, it affected every man on the bridge. Some were too shocked to speak, others swore angrily and bitterly. John Drilling and other boomers rushed off the bridge and called Rita in Portugal, volunteering to fly over. But she assured them there was nothing they could do. Her mother had arrived from St. Ignace and was helping care for the children.

  For the boomers, it was a tragic ending to all the exciting time in New York on the world's longest suspension span. They were proud of Bob Anderson. He had been a daring man on the bridge, and a charming man off it. His name would not be mentioned at the Verrazano-Narrows dedication, they knew, because Anderson—and others like him—were known only within the small world of the boomers. But in that world they were giants, they were heroes never lacking in courage or pride—men who remained always true to the boomer's code: going wherever the big job was

  . . . and lingering only a little while . . .

  then off again to another town, another bridge . . .

  linking everything but their lives.

  AFTERWORD

  It is a sunny New York afternoon in the late summer, and
I am standing near the western anchorage of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge on the water's edge of Staten Island. I have come here to pose for the author's photograph of this book that is my homage to the bridge that 1 first climbed forty years ago, when it spanned the harbor in a bridled state of juvenility without purpose or responsibility, lacking at the time the concrete roadway, the directional signs, and the toll plaza that would make it functional and self-supporting.

  Now it has grown into a commercial colossus that is crossed every day by 250,000 vehicles that deposit a daily sum of one million dollars, and it looms as the gateway to the city's harbor and to the high hopes that guide the entrepreneurial and persevering in-trinsicality of New Yorkers. This day the bridge itself was receiving a facelift from crews of maintenance workers who, moving up and down the towers and across the span in cable-suspended metal carts, were scraping rust spots off the surface with wire brushes, and smearing reddish lead waterproofing paste over the steel before applying coats of light gray paint with lamb's-wool rollers attached to long poles. The bridge is scraped and repainted from top to bottom every ten years. It takes five years to complete the job, costing management about seventy-five million dollars.

  The general manager of the bridge oversees its day-to-day operation from a brick office off the ramp near the Staten Island anchorage. He is a mild-mannered man of fifty-two who stands six-feet four, weighs 250 pounds, and is named Robert Tozzi. As a college student more than thirty years ago at St. John's University in Brooklyn, he worked for three summers as a toll collector on the Verrazano, beginning in 1969, five years after it opened, when the fare for each passenger vehicle was $.50 (it is now a round-trip fare of $7.00 per passenger vehicle) and amounted to almost one thousand dollars in coins and currency during each eight-hour work shift. As a toll collector Robert Tozzi was paid twenty dollars a day.

  The booth he used to occupy is a short walk away from his present-day office. Hanging from his office walls are monitors showing the flow of traffic across the bridge from thirty-two different camera angles—offering views from the two towers, the upper and lower roadways, the anchorages, and other points—but nothing he sees varies much from what he saw the day before, or the day before that. What happens on the bridge is quite predictable to him. Three vehicles will break down on the bridge almost every day, briefly causing traffic jams. He expects, and usually gets, two auto crashes a day—fender benders or other collisions not resulting in serious injuries. Traffic fatalities are rare, perhaps one every two years. The last one occurred in 1999. Each year, on average, two individuals with suicidal tendencies select the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge as the jumping off point to end their lives.

  Robert Tozzi's father was a maintenance manager with the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which built many of the city's toll-collecting facilities, including the Verrazano, and it was through his father's introduction that the younger Tozzi came to the agency. After three summers in the tollbooth, he was hired full time in 1975 to drive one of the Verrazano's tow trucks, helping to remove disabled cars from the roadway.

  In 1974, when he was twenty-four, Tozzi was offered the opportunity to drive one of the agency's sedans in order to chauffeur the Triborough's chairman, Robert Moses. For the next four-and-a-half years, dutifully and diplomatically, Tozzi drove Moses to countless locations. He knew that Moses, deficient in grace even in the best of times, was embittered over the bad press and negative commentary he had been receiving since the publication in 1974 of Robert Caro's highly critical book about him, entitled The Power Broker and subtitled: Bobert Moses and the Fall of New York. Approaching the end of his long career as an urban planner—he had paved the way for the creation of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and other great undertakings that he believed the public needed and should appreciate— Moses as an octogenarian found himself being second-guessed and excoriated on talk shows and in the media for his past decisions to demolish vast areas of living space and dispossess multitudes of people in order to build new highways, bridges, tunnels, and tollgates. In 1975 the Caro book won the Pulitzer Prize, adding insult to injury as far as Aloses was concerned.

  On the day I met Robert Tozzi—he escorted me to the anchorage himself, a necessary courtesy attributable to security policies instituted since the World Trade Center attacks—he said that he had never gotten around to buying The Power Broker, although the book is popular with many of his fellow employees.

  Robert Moses is now long deceased, as is the Verrazano's chief designer, O. H. Ammann, and also many of the residents and businesspeople of Brooklyn and Staten Island who in the late 1950s tried without success to prevent Moses from destroying their neighborhoods that stood in the proposed pathways to the bridge. Some of them, however, recently told me that their worst fears had failed to transpire, that the new location into which they had been forced to move their businesses or domiciles turned out not to be as disruptive or depressing as they had imagined. The structures they had moved to were generally in better condition than the ones they had surrendered to the wrecking crews; and while what they lost in sentimental value was irredeemable, and while they continued to resent the arbitrary power that Moses had wielded over their lives, they gradually became resigned to the inevitability of change and their inability to resist it.

  Among those who spoke out in 1959 against Moses's plan for the bridge was a dentist, Henry Amen, whose office in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn was designated to be leveled and paved over by the road builders. Dr. Amen was fortunate in finding a new office convenient enough for his Bay Ridge—based practice; he is still there today, working at the age of seventy-six, having as a partner a dentist of thirty-four who is his daughter.

  Another anti-Moses spokesman who I interviewed in the late 1950s was Joseph V. Sessa, who had somberly predicted his firm's demise after learning that the condemned properties in his neighborhood would result in the dispersal of 2,500 families "from which to draw." This figure was more than a third of the estimated 7,000 people who were being dislodged; but the mortician, unlike the dentist, would not see his own workplace destroyed. It was located along the fringe of the targeted area, on Fort Hamilton Parkway, and it remains there as it was, still dedicated to burying people—including Mr. Sessa, who passed away in 1977 at the age of seventy-nine. His resourceful grandson, Joseph J. Sessa, now operates the family business and has expanded it to include two other mortuaries located elsewhere in Brooklyn.

  The family that was perhaps the most inconvenienced by the construction of the bridge's approachways was that of a Brooklyn Navy Yard worker, John G Herbert, who, with his wife, Margaret, and fifteen of their seventeen children, resided until 1959 in a comfortable old ramshackle corner house on a hill adjacent to a park in the Bay Ridge area. Since their dwelling was soon to be pulverized, Mr. and Mrs. Herbert were persistently encouraged by the Triborough's resettlement office to select one of the three spacious houses that was available to them less than two miles away. Although they were unenthusiastic about the houses they were shown—none was near a park, all were located on densely populated blocks—they settled for the one closest to that which they were leaving. It took the couple twelve trips and eighteen hours to convey their children, their furniture, and the rest of their possessions; and, other than the resentment expressed along the way by their fifteen-year-old boy, Eugene, and his fourteen-year-old brother, Roy, the transfer was completed with efficiency.

  After Eugene and Roy had been told to walk back to the old homestead to retrieve a pet cat that had been forgotten, they expressed their feelings about the displacement by throwing bricks through what had been their bedroom windows, and with a rusty axe they chopped down the wooden railings of the front porch and the bannisters of the interior staircase, and knocked holes into the plaster walls—a cathartic experience.

  More than forty years later, Eugene is fifty-eight and recently retired from his job installing Otis elevators. (His thirteen surviving siblings now reside in various parts of New York, New Je
rsey, Delaware, Ohio, Minnesota, and Florida.) He lives in a rented second-story Brooklyn apartment with his wife and their twenty-year-old daughter who works in a doctor's office. The apartment is located on a busy residential block lined with row houses and trees and hard-to-find parking spaces. It is in the Bay Ridge section, not far from where Eugene Herbert's parents last lived. Although he pays it little notice, the Brooklyn tower of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge rises above the rooftops of his neighborhood.

  In Staten Island the bridge is also no longer an object of great interest or angst. Here a new generation of settlers, having grown up with it, accept it as essential to their expanding development, the highlight of their horizon, their link to the mammoth mosaic that is Brooklyn and to the seafront towers of Lower Manhattan that the writer Truman Capote once described as a "diamond iceberg."

  Although the Staten Island population of 443,000 (in a city of over 8 million) is now nearly double that of the prebridge figure, and while the island's once sprawling farmlands have disappeared along with the country roads through which motorists once moved bumpily past herds of grazing cattle, a provincial atmosphere still prevails here. Along tree-shaded residential streets one sees row upon row of single-family white frame houses with shuttered windows and roadside mailboxes and tidy lawns with poles bearing American flags that were on display long before the recent nationwide proliferation of patriotism prompted by the attacks of terrorists. These flags flew steadfastly in Staten Island as other flags were being burned in Manhattan and elsewhere by college students and others among the anti—Vietnam War activists of the 1960s and early '70s.