Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America

by Henry Petroski

  Ammann’s bridge views, described in the newspaper article occasioned by his birthday, are reminiscent of those from the Brooklyn flat where a bedridden Washington Roebling watched the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge of which his late father had dreamed. John Roebling, of course, had had the total misfortune of having his foot crushed by a ferryboat while he was laying out the alignment of his bridge and of contracting tetanus. Other bridge engineers had had the bad luck to see the crowning achievements of their careers collapse, as did Cooper and Moisseiff, near Quebec and Seattle, respectively. The reporter recounted that Ammann had worked on the investigations of each of those colossal bridge failures and that Ammann’s bridges had “known no tragedy through his own engineering miscalculations.” Ammann conceded that he was “lucky.”

  Luck or no, Ammann was hailed as “the most respected engineer of his time.” A further opportunity to lionize him would be provided at the opening ceremonies of the bridge across the Narrows, in November 1964. First, however, the bridge had to undergo the initiation rite of having its chosen name challenged. The name Verrazano-Narrows Bridge had been decided upon early enough for a commemorative stamp to be issued by the U.S. Post Office. The design of the five-cent stamp was unveiled “at a thinly disguised Democratic campaign rally on the steps of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall,” four weeks before it would be issued, which was to be on the day of the bridge opening. The crowd heard President Lyndon Johnson “praised by virtually every speaker,” including one who spoke of his personal recognition of the “tremendous role which has been played in our national life by Americans of Italian heritage,” and there was also the first public performance of “the Verrazano Bridge song,” which began, “In 1524, he opened up the door; that Verrazano man, whose name is on the span.” Italy also issued a stamp commemorating the opening of the bridge, but with the spelling “Verrazzano.” There was opposition to the name up to the very end, with ridicule for the honor thus paid to “a brave vagrant who is believed to have poked the nose of his ship through the Narrows.”

  The name Verrazano-Narrows Bridge would nonetheless remain, although the hyphen symbolizing the tension it had generated would often later be dropped or forgotten. But there would be plenty of comparisons with the Golden Gate, whose forty-two-hundred-foot main span was now surpassed by the 4,260-foot New York bridge. Other “statistical details” of the San Francisco landmark were also bettered by the Verrazano-Narrows, which in the wake of the Tacoma Narrows collapse included the newer span’s support of a 75-percent-greater load. The aesthetic of light and slender had been replaced with one of strong and solid, and the ever-popular numbers whose publication accompanied the completion of great structures stressed that the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was so large that the tops of its towers were more than an inch farther apart than the bottoms, merely because of the curvature of the earth. Another oft-repeated statistic was that the main span, which on average was 230 feet above the water, would be twelve feet lower in summer than in winter, when the lower temperatures caused the steel to contract.

  One chronicler of bridges has written that “the success of an engineering project may often be measured by the absence of any dramatic history,” but what may appear to be undramatic from one perspective can be very traumatic from another. To build a bridge from Brooklyn to Staten Island across the Narrows that ferryboat services, including one begun by Cornelius Vanderbilt in 1810, had plied for centuries required an enormous amount of land for approaches. Robert Moses called the bridge “the most important link in the great highway system stretching from Boston to Washington, or, if you please, Maine to Florida.” However, to close this link, especially on the Brooklyn side, meant disrupting long-established neighborhoods, and this was at least as difficult to accomplish as any engineering aspect of the problem.

  Since the main span of the Verrazano-Narrows was only sixty feet greater than that of the Golden Gate, the engineering choices were certainly nowhere near so dramatic as those made thirty years earlier in designing the George Washington, which, of course, had roughly doubled the then longest span. In his “preface” to a book about the building of the Verrazano-Narrows, Ammann referred to the “engineering phase in the construction” of such a great bridge as “essentially the application of scientific and technological progress in many fields.” Though he was not saying that engineering was merely applied science, he was stating that, in this case at least, rational experience was a sure guide. One bit of experience that Ammann insisted on applying to the Verrazano-Narrows was the construction of both upper and lower decks at the same time, even though there was no expectation of an immediate traffic demand for the lower deck, a decision no doubt made to eliminate any possibility that the bridge would not be stiff enough in the wind. Another supposedly impersonal engineering and economic decision was to design the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge without a pedestrian walkway, but one can speculate as to whether this may have been dictated by a social or psychological concern that pedestrians, more easily than drivers and passengers in vehicles, would sense the flexibility of the record span—or merely to eliminate the bother of people on the bridge. Whatever the case, this limitation is now overcome at least once a year, when the beginning leg of the annual New York City marathon is run across the span.

  The opening ceremonies for the bridge were held on November 21, 1964. Music was provided by the Department of Sanitation band, and Robert Moses rode in the first of fifty-two black limousines that brought official guests. In an editorial on the occasion, The New York Times spoke of the completion of the bridge as crowning “the careers of two men to whom New York already owes a colossal obligation,” Ammann and Moses, and recalled the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority chairman’s “resolve to conquer the staggering obstacles” to the bridge’s construction, which had “resulted in a masterpiece he rightly ranks second only to the works of Shakespeare in the durability of its beauty.” The bridge that the engineer was said to have designed to “last forever” was not just a critical link in a traffic artery, however, and “the realization that all this grace is merely an instrument for the insensate rush of endless ribbons of cars, trucks and buses is too depressingly mundane to contemplate in this moment of magnificent birth.” The Times had to resort to the poet Hart Crane’s lines about the Brooklyn Bridge to close its paean:

  The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, shortly after it was opened in 1964, with Brooklyn and Manhattan in the background (photo credit 5.24)

  Through the hound cable strands, the arching path

  Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings,—

  Taut miles of shuttling moonlight syncopate

  The whispered rush, telepathy of wires.…

  The newspaper’s reporter, Gay Talese, had more of an ear and eye for the immediate than the editorial writer, however. Talese had written a book about the design and construction of the Verrazano-Narrows, and now he reported how the motorcade proceeded to the Brooklyn approach to the bridge, where five pairs of gold scissors awaited, respectively, Moses, Governor Rockefeller, Mayor Robert Wagner, and the borough presidents of Brooklyn and Staten Island. The ribbon-cutting was delayed somewhat while politicians fought through the crowd of “generals, admirals, politicians, women in mink coats, business leaders, pretty girls.” Talese also noted Ammann’s arrival, not in the first but in the eighteenth limousine: “A quiet and modest man, he was barely recognized by the politicians and other dignitaries at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. He stood in the crowd without saying a word, although occasionally, as inconspicuously as he could, he sneaked a look at the bridge looming in the distance, sharply outlined in the cloudless sky.”

  The motorcade resumed to carry the dignitaries to the other side of the bridge, where Moses was to be the master of ceremonies. When it came time to introduce the engineer, Moses said, “I now ask that one of the significant great men of our time—modest, unassuming and too often overlooked on such grandiose occasions—stand and be recognized.” The engineer removed his hat a
nd stood, and Moses continued: “It may be that in the midst of so many celebrities, you don’t even know who he is. My friends, I ask that you now look upon the greatest living bridge engineer, perhaps the greatest of all time.” Unfortunately, Moses never mentioned Ammann’s name, and the engineer resumed his seat, “again lost in the second row of the grandstand.”

  Later that evening, when Ammann was home with his family, the phone rang and his wife answered. She turned to Ammann and announced, “It’s Ed Sullivan. He wants you to appear on his TV program tonight.” Ammann is reported to have said, “Tell him, ‘No, thank you.’ ” After his wife hung up, the engineer asked, “Who is Ed Sullivan?” Whether Ammann actually knew who he was or not, the story serves to carry one step further the image of this engineer as quietly devoted to his job, oblivious to everything else in the world. But one could also interpret the story as one shy engineer’s private retaliation for his anonymity at the ceremony dedicating the bridge that owed so much to him.

  Among the onlookers at the dedication ceremonies for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was a college freshman named Donald Trump, who was attending the event with his father. Sixteen years later, after the younger Trump had established himself as a real-estate developer in his own right and been credited with “reshaping the skyline of Manhattan,” he recalled to a reporter having had “a sudden realization, an epiphany,” at the ceremony that “always remained with him, shaping the way he made his fortune in real estate in New York City.” Though his recollection of the day, which Talese at the time described as cloudless, may have undergone a certain embellishment, Trump did remember correctly some of its more salient points:

  The rain was coming down for hours while all these jerks were being introduced and praised. But all I’m thinking about is that all these politicians who opposed the bridge are being applauded. Yet, in a corner, just standing there in the rain, is this man, this 85-year-old engineer who came from Sweden [sic] and designed this bridge, who poured his heart into it, and nobody even mentioned his name.

  Trump’s epiphany, “then and there,” was “that if you let people treat you how they want, you’ll be made a fool.” The realization that he “would never forget” was that he “didn’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.” Regardless of what he forgot or did not, Trump’s recollection of the way Moses omitted Ammann’s name at the Verrazano-Narrows ceremony is a poignant reminder of the fate of the engineer. The record shows Moses’s speeches not to be terribly well crafted, and so it seems likely that his verbal slight of Ammann was unintended. When Moses said candidly that, among celebrities, the engineer was not likely to be known, he was only speaking the truth.

  It has often been said that engineers get their satisfaction not from personal recognition but from the recognition of their works. Whether this is the collectively shared rationalization of often moody personalities who tend to be more comfortable engaged in problem solving than engaged by crowds, many an engineer appears to have subscribed to it. And Ammann seems to have been no exception. He accepted honors but seems to have sought out none other than, or at least none so deliberately as, the honor of being the engineer among engineers to lead the building of great bridges. In this he was not shy, and for this he would be remembered.

  Othmar Ammann died in 1965, after a long and active life ranging from lonely work to shared glory. When Robert Moses spoke of him at the dedication of Othmar Ammann College at the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1968, the engineer was recalled as a “dreamer in steel” who was more than an individual, a paragon among engineers. “The Ammanns represent not merely mathematics, materials and stresses and strains, but character which can’t be mined, fabricated and molded, but has to be there from the beginning. You have it or you don’t, and Othmar Ammann had it.” Though not every one of the engineer’s contemporaries may have agreed, Moses’s praise was, in broad terms, very well deserved indeed. Ammann had dreams of great bridges, and he had the exceptional inclination and talent to realize those dreams in his distinctive style.

  STEINMAN

  Many children have grown up in the shadow of a bridge, especially in a city like New York. In the late nineteenth century, the Lower East Side of that city was crowded with small children and one large bridge—that leading to Brooklyn—and life among the ever-present but ever-changing shadows cast by its approaches, abutments, decks, and towers was hard and squalid. Escape via the automobile to the suburbs was for many not yet even a realistic dream, and one did what one could do with what one had.

  The stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge had risen ever so slowly during the first half of the 1870s, and its cables had been spun equally slowly during the second half of the decade. As the bridge deck was hung in the early 1880s—piece by piece, like laundry from a line—the shadows cast by the structure lengthened and thickened over the tenements of New York City. There was a bright day of celebration and a still brighter evening of fireworks when the bridge opened in May 1883, and the central promenade that John Roebling had so thoughtfully designed above the traffic provided a welcome escape route from the heat and closeness of the tenements, if only for the hour or so it took to walk to Brooklyn and back, perhaps stopping midway to look out at New York Harbor.

  Perhaps some found the bridge or its shadows oppressive, but the great structure provided an alternative to the ferries that so many people had daily to take back and forth across the East River. Others discovered in the bridge a new prosperity, with the uniting of the formally separate cities of New York and Brooklyn providing new opportunities for commercial growth and real-estate development. On the other hand, some residents of the Lower East Side may not have thought much about the bridge at all, especially if they were busy raising large families in small apartments, as so many of the immigrant factory-worker families in the neighborhood were. However, at least one child growing up in those apartments became obsessed with bridges of all kinds.

  The New York approach to the Brooklyn Bridge, near where David Steinman spent his childhood (photo credit 6.1)

  David Barnard Steinman was born on June 11, 1886, and his childhood might have seemed unremarkable even to himself had he not lived in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge, which was to him not cold but warm. He grew up with the dominating bridge, whose towers looked over the city day and night, and whose arms of traffic reached far into the city, bringing and taking people and goods in unprecedented volume and with unprecedented speed. Not only was the Brooklyn Bridge there and functioning as a great communicator between what young David knew and what he could discover, but as he grew so did another bridge—the Williamsburg—under construction a mere mile or so away. For him, the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges became almost surrogate parents.

  Eve and Louis Steinman were the real parents of David and his six siblings, but his hagiolatrous biographer, William Ratigan, no doubt acceded to Steinman’s wishes in keeping them as much out of his later life as possible. Ratigan’s 350-page biography has young David recalling only that his immigrant parents were lonesome, that “his father lashed him with a cat-o’-nine tails for wearing out his shoe leather” exploring Manhattan, and that “his mother wept.” Among Steinman’s few recorded recollections of his mother was of her “softly weeping” for the “cottage and the fields, the streams and meadows, of her native land,” which remained nameless. Neither Steinman’s mother nor father appears in the index to the biography, and there are no pictures of them or of his nameless siblings, from whom he learned the alphabet and the numbers. His first alluring taste of school was at five years old, when he was taken by his older sister to her teacher and principal so that he could show them his prowess in mathematics: “He could rattle off the powers of two: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, up to a million.” He was tested with mental multiplication problems, like 17 times 19 and 27 times 43, and he was rewarded with candy and visits to teachers’ homes, which “were a glimpse of another world.” A boxed charlotte russe brought home from one of those visits was such a treasure that
it was nursed for nearly three weeks, being kept fresh on the fire escape because the Steinman apartment had no ice box. There is a mythic quality to Steinman’s childhood, to his finding solace mainly in the cradle of the Brooklyn Bridge’s cables and stays, and in the promise and reward of education.

  Talk about building a new bridge across the East River to Williamsburg had, of course, begun even before the Brooklyn Bridge was opened, but a debate ensued as to whether the next crossing should be farther north instead, at Blackwell’s Island. Before young David Steinman had reached his tenth birthday, Theodore Cooper had prepared plans and specifications for a “steel wire suspension bridge, stiffened by a longitudinal girder,” between 59th and 60th streets, and Leffert Buck had had his plans approved for a new suspension bridge with four cables, each three inches larger in diameter than those of the Brooklyn Bridge, so that the elevated railway could be extended from the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn into New York. By the time David was twelve years old, the controversy had died down over the bare steel towers and the stepped-truss design of Buck’s bridge, and work on the foundations and anchorages had begun. The precocious and studious youngster took a keen interest in the construction project and began to seek opportunities for further education.