The Bridge Page 12

  Staten Islanders are traditionally conservative, standard-bearing advocates of law and order. A disproportionate number of them serve the city as police officers and firefighters, and among the 343 New York City firefighters who lost their lives in the World Trade Center disaster, 78 were from Staten Island. Residents of Irish ancestry have historically influenced the social and political landscape here, but now their coreligionists, the Italian-Americans, are the dominant group. A majority of them are related ancestrally to agrarian villages in Southern Italy, and they have reinforced a "village mentality" on the island, a sense of insularity and regularity, an affinity for familiarity.

  This is not to say that Staten Island is without its diversity of newcomers. Asians and Jews from Russia have joined such tenured minorities as Hispanics and African-Americans. But the island remains a bastion of blue-collar white families and cadres of middle-management commuters and young women who are employed in Manhattan as secretaries, bank tellers, and sales reps and who, in many cases, will quit these jobs once they marry and have children.

  Among the island's commuting population is a strapping, ruddy-complected man of six-feet-two named John McKee, who, after placing his boots, his tool belt, and his hard hat in the trunk of his car, drives to work across the bridge that forty years before he had helped to erect. His two bridge-building brothers were then with him on the job; and on a cloudy, windy Wednesday morning in early October of 1963, eight months before the skeletal steel structure of the Verrazano was fully bracketed and bolted, John McKee's younger brother, Gerard, slipped off one of the cables and fell more than 350 feet into the water, hitting with such force that he immediately lost his life.

  There was a work stoppage that day, and subsequently a five-day strike was initiated by the union boss of Local 40, Ray Corbett, who, though fearless when he himself was a young man wearing a hard hat—in 1949 he stood casually atop the Empire State Building overseeing the installation of its 224-foot television tower—believed in 1963, in the wake of Gerard McKee's death and two earlier fatalities, that the Verrazano project was becoming unnecessarily perilous and that safety nets should immediately be strung up under the bridge's framework. This was finally agreed to by the management, and Ray Corbett's concern was justified in the months ahead as three other bridge workers lost their balance but not their lives thanks to the nets.

  Among the lucky trio was Robert Walsh, a friend of the McKee family and currently Local 40's business manager. The workers' headquarters building in Manhattan, on Park Avenue South between thirtieth and thirty-first Streets, is named in honor of Ray Corbett, who died in 1992 at the age of seventy-seven.

  The two surviving McKee brothers have continued to practice their hazardous craft without debilitating injuries since Gerard's death, but both men are contemplating their retirement. John McKee is fifty-nine. His brother, James, living in Brooklyn, is sixty. James McKee's wife, Nettie, who is an administrative secretary with the borough's school system, has remained in social contact with the late Gerard McKee's onetime fiancee, Margaret Nucito, who now resides in Florida, but in the early 1960s lived across the street from the McKees in Brooklyn, in the working class Catholic neighborhood of Red Hook.

  Margaret was then acknowledged to be the prettiest girl on the block, a petite Italian-American redhead who spent her days as a file clerk with the phone company and came directly home after work. She became engaged to Gerard McKee when they were nineteen, after he had dropped out of high school in his final year to enroll in an apprentice program that would in time qualify him to join his older brothers in Local 40.

  Margaret and Gerard had been classmates in parochial school and had dated during and after their years in high school, although "dating" in those days in that neighborhood hardly connoted sexual permissiveness. Had Gerard not fallen off the bridge, Margaret would have been his virgin bride, perhaps among the last women of her generation in Red Hook to be so determinedly inclined regarding premarital chastity; and yet along with her firmly held opinions on delayed gratification and the sanctity of marriage, and her feelings of appreciation and tenderness toward Gerard for supporting and respecting her views, she doubted that she would have been very happy as Gerard's wife.

  She told me this during an interview in her home seven weeks after Gerard's funeral, which had been attended by hundreds of fellow bridge workers. These men were the only individuals that Gerard looked up to, she said; they mattered more to him than any girlfriend or wife ever would. He sought acceptance not only in an all-male world, she suggested, but in a brotherhood of chance takers who bonded together like the steel they connected; and even after their day's work was done, they continued their camaraderie in bars as they talked about the job and exchanged jokes and bragged about themselves and one another, all the while drinking beer and taking their own sweet time about returning to their homes.

  Still, had Gerard lived, and despite her reservations about their compatibility, she said she would have proceeded with their marital plans. It would have been scandalous not to do so. The wedding date had been announced, their union was a fait accompli as far as their kinfolk and friends were concerned. She was a product of a traditional Italian-American family, obedient if at times uncertain. She did not know exactly what she wanted, but she did not want exactly what she had. In 1967, four years after her fiance's death, Alargaret Nucito married a man from outside her neighborhood who in no way reminded her of the late Gerard McKee. He ran a home appliance shop that specialized in selling refrigerators and washing machines, he catered mostly to women, and he was comfortable in their presence.

  Another person associated with Gerard McKee that I interviewed during the summer of 2002 was Edward Iannielli, now sixty-seven, but a grieving man of twenty-seven when I first met him in 1963, weeks after he had briefly clung to, and then lost hold of, the two-hundred-pound body of his doomed coworker. Following the funeral, and haunted by the experience of Gerard's death, Edward Iannielli resumed working on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge until it was completed in 1964. In the years that followed, he was engaged in the construction of about fifty high-rise office buildings in the metropolitan area, and other projects as well, until he decided to retire in 1991. A religious man who regularly attends Mass and believes that everyday events are instilled with a special meaning, he interpreted it as inevitable that he would cap his thirty-six-year career by ending up on the Verrazano, joining forty fellow workers for three months, from the middle of the summer through the fall of 1991 in the task of removing rust from the towers and cables that, along with old memories of sadness, brought him renewed feelings of personal pride and professional achievement.

  He was fifty-five years old when he returned to work on the bridge. His back was in pain, he suffered from sciatica, and his left hand had a missing index finger, a permanently bent middle finger, and a fourth finger cut off at the knuckle, all the result of work-related accidents. He wore his faded brown hard hat, his much-traveled tool belt, his blue jeans, and one of the rather gaudy tropical shirts he liked to wear even in cooler weather. He also wore a new, expensive pair of calf-high soft leather boots with rubber soles and no heels, boots he fondly regarded as stumble-proof good-luck boots, the last pair he would ever wear while traversing the beam of a bridge.

  Despite his advanced age and his occupational ailments, Edward Iannielli had drawn one of the more difficult assignments on the bridge, that of removing rust from the highest points of the towers. His height (five feet seven inches) and his weight (one hundred and forty pounds) meant that he would not put undue stress on the quarter-inch galvanized cable wire that would carry him more than six hundred feet to the tower tops.

  On a particular morning, Iannielli stepped out onto the lower ledge of the tower on the Brooklyn side, overlooking the upper deck of the roadway, two hundred feet above the water, and he eased himself down into a squarish silver metal container that was attached to a cable; with his right hand holding onto the rail of the container, he used his lef
t hand to press the "up" lever that activated the electrical motor lodged in the base of the container, directly beneath his floor space. When he arrived at the top, which took him twenty minutes, his job was to lean out and use wire brushes and scrapers to remove the rust, and then, wearing rubber gloves, to smear a rust-resistant paste onto whatever corrosion existed along the flat surface and bolts of the tower. As he did this he envisioned himself thirty years before inserting those same bolts into the same steel and once more he felt an identity with the great structure. Tears came to his eyes as he continued to work, and, dipping his gloved left hand into a bucket of reddish paste, he reached out to touch an untarnished plate of steel that was secured by a row of bolts and with his bent middle finger he wrote as clearly as he could, in block letters, "Catherine"—the name of his wife of thirty years, who had recently died of cancer.

  From his vantage point he could see, extending for miles, the variegated shapes and shades of the city: the verdant parks and tree-lined highways, the smokestacks, church steeples, row houses, apartment buildings, and skyscrapers—the taller they were, the more familiar he was with them.

  If helping to build the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge had been the most gratifying job of his life, and it was, then the low point came during the years he was employed as a worker at the World Trade Center. It was never in his nature to be critical of designers and engineers, and particularly so now that the World Trade Center building site has become a memorial shrine. However, during the years he participated in its construction, beginning in 1968 and continuing through 1971, Iannielli and most of the workers he was associated with were appalled by the lightness of the floor beams they were directed to connect, the lack of interior support columns, the seeming fragility of the entire construction, and the hasty pace they were instructed to follow in adding to the skyline of New York two tubular towers that suggested from afar a pair of elongated birdcages.

  "Flimsy" was how Iannielli had characterized the formation of the World Trade Center in one of our interviews during the summer of 2002. A day later he telephoned to say he regretted using the word, fearing it made him sound insensitive to the event of September 11. But I reminded him that his feelings about the project's design and stratification had already been expressed by several other workers I had spoken to, many of them Verrazano veterans. I also told him that "flimsy" had been used in a speech delivered months before at Stanford University by Ronald O. Hamburger, a member of a team of structural engineers assessing the performance of the World Trade Center during the terrorist attacks, the ensuing fires, and ultimately the demolition. "The floor trusses were relatively flimsy . . . the trusses just fell apart," Mr. Hamburger said. It was pointed out by other engineers that the World Trade Center buildings were about ninety percent "air," designed to achieve the utmost in rentable floor space and flexibility, unencumbered by columns, explaining why the rubble in the wake of the collapse was only a few stories high. "We didn't find much concrete in there," I was told by one hard-hatted worker who was among the unionists' volunteers who removed the debris. "It was mostly powder, dust, mounds of dust."

  In addition to the World Trade Center's design, its building standards, and possible flaws in its methods of fireproofing, Edward Iannielli remembers his working days there as a dispiriting time, an era of conflict in which student antiwar demonstrators and various counterculturists presumed to occupy the moral high ground in New York and elsewhere, while such hard-hatted unionists as himself, patriotic traditionalists opposed to the desecration of the flag, were frequently depicted in the media as reactionary goons and worse.

  One day in early May of 1970, Iannielli recalled, a melee broke out near Wall Street between crowds of antiwar activists and dozens of workers who had followed them there. Iannielli had not accompanied his angry coworkers, disinclined to inflict added punishment on his body, but when they returned they told him that they had beaten up many demonstrators and had destroyed countless antiwar banners. They had also stormed City Hall and forced Mayor John Lindsay to raise the flag on the roof to full staff, displeasing the antiwar faction that had earlier convinced him to lower it in memory of the Kent State marchers who had been killed by law enforcement authorities in Ohio earlier in the week.

  "When I think of the World Trade Center I think of all the hostility, all the bad feelings that seemed to be built into it from the very beginning," one of Iannielli's coworkers told me. "We who had been on the job were as shocked and depressed as everyone else by what happened to all those innocent people. But as for the buildings, well, we weren't so surprised they went down the way they did."

  Some among the five hundred steelworkers who had worked on the World Trade Center had come down to New York from the Indian reservation of mixed-blood Mohawks located along the St. Lawrence River near Montreal; and the worker I most wanted to see again was Danny Montour, an amusing and amiable individual who had befriended me in 1963 after I had met him working on the Verrazano. During this time he had taken me up to the reservation to spend a weekend with his family, introducing me to his wife, Lorraine, and others in his immediate and extended family, all the male members being bridge workers. His father had died on the job in 1956, and his grandfather in 1907. When Danny Montour introduced me to his two-year-old son, Mark, Lorraine, the boy's mother, expressed the hope that he would seek a different means of livelihood than his male kinfolk.

  In the summer of 2002, I telephoned the Montour home and learned from Lorraine that Danny was dead. He had died in 1972 at the age of thirty-four, she said, having fallen ten stories after a concrete ledge had crumbled under him when he was constructing a hospital near JFK Airport in Queens. Their son, Mark, had attended Cornell University for a while, she said, but—"It's in his blood"—he is currently employed with a crew that is erecting a skyscraper in Jersey City that will be completed in 2003.

  When I contacted him on his cell phone, Mark Montour explained that he was talking to me while standing on a steel beam seven hundred feet in the air, overlooking Ground Zero on the opposite side of the harbor and with a view of a dozen buildings that his late father helped to build, including the Met Life Building, when it was called the Pan Am, and, of course, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which, even on cloudy days, he can clearly see.

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