The Bridge

by Gay Talese

  This made him challenging to some women, and frustrating to others, yet intriguing to most. On his first week in St. Ignace, while stopped at a gas station, he noticed a carload of girls nearby and, exuding all the shy and bumbling uncertainty of a new boy in town, addressed himself politely to the prettiest girl in the car—a Swedish beauty, a very healthy girl whose boyfriend had just been drafted—and thus began an unforgettable romance that would last until the next one.

  Having saved a few thousand dollars from working on the Mackinac, he became, very briefly, a student at the University of Arkansas and also bought a $2,700 Impala. One night in Ola, Arkansas, he cracked up the car and might have gotten into legal difficulty had not his date that evening been the judge's daughter.

  John Drilling seemed to live a charmed life. Of all the bridge builders who worked on the Mackinac, and who would later come east to work on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, young John Drilling seemed the luckiest—with the possible exception of his close friend, Robert Anderson.

  Anderson was luckier mainly because he had lived longer, done more, survived more; and he never lost his sunny disposition or incurable optimism. He was thirty-four years old when he came to the Mackinac. He had been married to one girl for a dozen years, to another for two weeks. He had been in auto accidents, been hit by falling tools, taken falls—once toppling forty-two feet—but his only visible injury was two missing inside fingers on his left hand, and he never lost its full use.

  One day on the north tower of the Mackinac, the section of catwalk upon which Anderson was standing snapped loose, and suddenly it came sliding down like a rollercoaster, with Anderson clinging to it as it bumped and raced down the cables, down 1,800 feet all the way to near the bottom where the cables slope gently and straighten out before the anchorage. Anderson quietly got off and began the long climb up again. Fortunately for him, the Mackinac was designed by David B. Steinman, who preferred long, tapering backspans; had the bridge been designed by O. H. Ammann, who favored shorter, chunkier backspans, such as the type he was then creating for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, Bob Anderson would have had a steeper, more abrupt ride down, and might have gone smashing into the anchorage and been killed. But Anderson was lucky that way.

  Off the bridge, Anderson had a boomer's luck with women. All the moving around he had done during his youth as a boomer's son, all the shifting from town to town and the enforced flexibility required of such living, gave him a casual air of detachment, an ability to be at home anywhere. Once, in Mexico, he made his home in a whorehouse. The prostitutes down there liked him very much, fought over him, admired his gentle manners and the fact that he treated them all like ladies. Finally the madam invited him in as a full-time house guest and each night Anderson would dine with them, and in the morning he stood in line with them awaiting his turn in the shower.

  Though he stands six feet and is broad-shouldered and erect, Bob Anderson is not a particularly handsome fellow; but he has bright, alert eyes, and a round, friendly, usually smiling face, and he is very disarming, a sort of Tom Jones of the bridge business— smooth and swift, somewhat gallant, addicted to good times and hot-blooded women, and yet never slick or tricky.

  He is also fairly lucky at gambling, having learned a bit back in Oklahoma from his uncle Manuel, a guitar-playing rogue who once won a whole carnival playing poker. Anderson avoids crap games, although one evening at the Nicolet, when a crap game got started on the floor of the men's room and he'd been invited to join, he did.

  "Oh, I was drunk that night," he said, in his slow southwestern drawl, to a friend some days later. "I was so drunk I could hardly see. But I jes' kept rolling them dice, and all I was seeing was sevens and elevens, sevens and elevens, Jee-sus Kee-rist, all night long it went like that, and I kept winning and drinking and winning some more. Finally lots of other folks came jamming in, hearing all the noise and all, and in this men's toilet room there's some women and tourists who also came in jes' watching me roll those sevens and elevens.

  "Next morning I woke up with a helluva hangover, but on my bureau I seen this pile of money. And when I felt inside my pockets they were stuffed with bills, crumpled up like dried leaves. And when I counted it all, it came to more than one thousand dollars. And that day on the bridge, there was guys coming up to me and saying, 'Here, Bob, here's the fifty I borrowed last night,' or, 'Here's the hundred,' and I didn't even remember they borrowed it. Jee-sus Kee-rist, what a night!"

  When Bob Anderson finally left the Mackinac job and St. Ignace, he had managed to save five thousand dollars, and, not knowing what else to do with it, he bought a round-trip airplane ticket and went flying off to Tangier, Paris, and Switzerland—"whoring and drinking," as he put it—and then, flat broke, except for his return ticket, he went back to St. Ignace and married a lean, lovely brunette he'd been unable to forget.

  And not long after that, he packed his things and his new wife, and along with dozens of other boomers—with John Drilling and Drag-Up, with Ace Cowan and Jack Kelly and other veterans of the Mackinac and the Nicolet—he began the long road trip eastward to try his luck in New York.

  CHAPTER TWO

  PANIC IN

  BROOKLYN

  "You sonamabitchl" the old Italian shoemaker cried, standing in the doorway of the Brooklyn real estate office, glaring at the men who sat behind desks in the rear of the room. "You sonamabitch" he repeated when nobody looked up.

  "Hey" snapped one of the men, jumping up from his desk, "who are you talking to?"

  "You," said the shoemaker, his small, disheveled figure leaning against the door unsteadily, as if he'd been drinking, his tiny dark eyes angry and bloodshot. "You take-a my store . . . you no give-a me notting, you . . ."

  "Now listen here," said the real estate man, quickly walking to where the shoemaker stood and looking down at him hard, "we will have none of that talk around here. In fact I am going to call the cops . . ."

  He grabbed the phone nearest him and began to dial. The shoemaker watched for a moment, not seeming to care. Then he shrugged to himself and slowly turned and, without another word, walked out the door and shuffled down the street. The real estate man, putting down the telephone, watched the shoemaker go. He did not chase him. He wanted nothing further to do with him— neither with him nor with any of those boisterous people who had been making so much noise lately, cursing or signing petitions or issuing threats, as if it had been the real estate mens idea to build the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and the big highway leading up to it, the highway that would cut into the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn where seven thousand people now lived, where eight hundred buildings now stood—including a shoestore—and would level everything in its path into a long, smooth piece of concrete.

  No, it was not their idea, it was the idea of Robert Moses and his Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority to build the bridge and its adjoining highways—but the real estate men, hired by the Authority, were getting most of the direct blame because it was they, not Moses, who had to face the people and say, "Abandon your homes—we must build a bridge."

  Some people, particularly old people, panicked. Many of them pleaded with the Authority's representatives and prayed to God not to destroy these homes where their children had been born, where their husbands had died. Others panicked with anger, saying this was their home, their castle, and Mr. Moses would have to drag them from it bodily.

  Some took the news quietly, waiting without words to be listed among the missing waiting for the moving van as if it meant death itself. With the money the Authority paid them for their old home, they went to Florida, or to Arizona, or to another home in Brooklyn, any home, not seeming to care very much because now they were old people and new homes were all the same.

  The old shoemaker, nearly seventy, returned to Southern Italy, back to his native Cosenza, where he had some farmland he hoped to sell. He had left Cosenza for America when he was twenty-two years old. And now, in 1959, seeing Cosenza again was seeing how little it had chang
ed. There were still goats and donkeys climbing up the narrow roads, and some peasant women carrying clay pots on their heads, and a few men wearing black bands on their sleeves or ribbons in their lapels to show that they were in mourning; and still the same white stone houses speckled against the lush green of the mountainside—houses of many generations.

  When he arrived, he was greeted by relatives he had long forgotten, and they welcomed him like a returning hero. But later they began to tell him about their ailments, their poverty, all their problems, and he knew what was coming next. So he quickly began to tell them about his problems, sparing few details, recalling how he had fallen behind in the rent of his shoestore in Brooklyn, how the Authority had thrown him out without a dime, and how he now found himself back in Italy where he had started—all because this damned bridge was going to be built, this bridge the Americans were planning to name after an Italian explorer the shoemaker's relatives had never heard of, this Giovanni da Verrazano, who, sailing for the French in 1524, discovered New York Bay. The shoemaker went on and on, gesturing with his hands and making his point, making certain they knew he was no soft touch—and, a day or two later, he went about the business of trying to sell the farmland. . . .

  On the Staten Island side, opposition to the bridge was nothing like it was in Brooklyn, where more than twice as many people and buildings were affected by the bridge; in fact, in Staten Island there had long been powerful factions that dreamed of the day when a bridge might be built to link their borough more firmly with the rest of New York City Staten Island had always been the most isolated, the most ignored of New York's five boroughs; it was separated from Manhattan by five miles of water and a half-hour's ride on the ferry.

  While New Yorkers and tourists had always enjoyed riding the Staten Island ferry—"a luxury cruise at a penny a mile"—nobody was ever much interested in getting to the other side. What was there to see? Sixty percent of the island's fifty-four square miles were underdeveloped as of 1958. Most of its 225,000 citizens lived in one-family houses. It was the dullest of New York's boroughs, and when a New York policeman was in the doghouse with headquarters, he was often transferred to Staten Island.

  The island first acquired its rural quality when the British controlled it three hundred years ago, encouraging farming rather than manufacturing, and that was the way many Staten Islanders wanted it to remain—quiet and remote. But on the last day of 1958, after years of debate and doubt, plans for the building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge finally became definite and the way of those who cherished the traditional life was in decline. But many more Staten Island residents were overjoyed with the news; they had wanted a change, had grown bored with the provincialism, and now hoped the bridge would trigger a boom—and suddenly they had their wish.

  The bridge announcement was followed by a land rush. Real estate values shot up. A small lot that cost $1,200 in 1958 was worth $6,000 in 1959, and larger pieces of property worth $100,000 in the morning often sold for $200,000 that afternoon. Tax-delinquent properties were quickly claimed by the city. Huge foreign syndicates from Brazil, Italy, and Switzerland moved in for a quick kill. New construction was planned for almost every part of Staten Island, and despite complaints and suits against contractors for cheaply built homes (one foreman was so ashamed of the shoddy work he was ordered to do that he waited until night to leave the construction site) nothing discouraged the boom or deglamorized the bridge in Staten Island.

  The bridge had become, in early 1959, months before any workmen started to put it up, the symbol of hope.

  "We are now on our way to surmounting the barrier of isolation," announced the borough president, Albert V. Maniscalco— while other leaders were conceding that the bridge, no matter what it might bring, could not really hurt Staten Island. What was there to hurt? "Nothing has ever been successful in Staten Island in its entire history," said one resident, Robert Regan, husband of opera singer Eileen Farrell. He pointed out that there had been attempts in the past to establish a Staten Island opera company, a semi-professional football team, a dog track, a boxing arena, a symphony orchestra, a midget auto track, a basketball team—and all failed. "The only thing that might save this island," he said, "is a lot of new people."

  Over in Brooklyn, however, it was different. They did not need or want new people. They had a flourishing, middle-class, almost all-white community in the Bay Ridge section, and they were satisfied with what they had. Bay Ridge, which is in western Brooklyn along the ridge of Upper New York Bay and Tower New York Bay, commands a superb view of the Narrows, a mile-wide tidal strait that connects the two bays, and through which pass all the big ships entering or leaving New York. Among its first settlers were thousands of Scandinavians, most of them Danes, who liked Bay Ridge because of its nearness to the water and the balmy breeze. And in the late nineteenth century, Bay Ridge became one of the most exclusive sections of Brooklyn.

  It was not that now, in 1959, except possibly along its shorefront section, which was lined with trees and manicured lawns and with strong sturdy homes, one of them occupied by Charles Atlas. The rest of Bay Ridge was almost like any other Brooklyn residential neighborhood, except that there were few if any Negroes living among the whites. The whites were mostly Catholic. The big churches, some with parishes in excess of 12,000, were supported by the lace-curtain Irish and aspiring Italians, and the politics, usually Republican, were run by them, too. There were still large numbers of Swedes and Danes, and also many Syrian shopkeepers, and there were old Italian immigrants (friends of the shoemaker) who were hanging on, but it was the younger, second- and third-generation Italians, together with the Irish, who determined the tone of Bay Ridge. They lived, those not yet rich enough for the shorefront homes, in smaller brown brick houses jammed together along tree-lined streets, and they competed each day for a parking place at the curb. They shopped along busy sidewalks clustered with tiny neighborhood stores with apartments above, and there were plenty of small taverns on corners, and there was the Hamilton House for a good dinner at night—provided they wore a jacket and tie—and there was a dimly lit sidestreet supper-club on the front barstool of which sat a curvesome, winkled platinum blond with a cigarette, but no match.

  So Bay Ridge, in 1959, had things in balance; it was no longer chic, but it was tidy, and most people wanted no change, no new people, no more traffic. And they certainly wanted no bridge. When the news came that they would get one, the local politicians were stunned. Some women began to cry A number of people refused to believe it. They had heard this talk before, they said, pointing out that as far back as 1888 there had been plans for a railroad tunnel that would link Brooklyn and Staten Island. And in 1923 New York's Mayor Hylan even broke ground for a combined rail-and-automobile tunnel to Staten Island, and all that happened was that the city lost a half-million dollars and now has a little hole somewhere going nowhere.

  And there had been talk about this big bridge across the Narrows for twenty years, they said, and each time it turned out to be just talk. In 1950 there was talk that a bridge between Brooklyn and Staten Island was a good thing, but what if the Russians blew it up during a war: Would not the United States Navy ships docked in New York harbor be trapped behind the collapsed bridge at the harbor's entrance? And a year later, there was more talk of a tunnel to Staten Island, and then more debate on the bridge, and it went on this way, on and on. So, they said, in 1959, maybe this is still all talk, no action, so let's not worry.

  What these people failed to realize was that about 1957 the talk changed a little; it became more intense, and Robert Moses was getting more determined, and New York City's Fire Commissioner was so sure in 1957 that the bridge to Staten Island would become a reality that he quickly got in his bid with the City Planning Commission for a big new Staten Island firehouse, asking that he be given $379,500 to build it and $250,000 to equip it. They did not realize that the powerful Brooklyn politician loseph T. Sharkey saw the bridge as inevitable in 1958, and he had made one la
st desperate attack, too late, on Robert Moses on the City Council floor, shouting that Moses was getting too much power and was listening only to the engineers, not to the will of the people. And they did not realize, too, that while they were thinking it was still all talk, a group of engineers around a drawing board were quietly inking out a large chunk of Brooklyn that would be destroyed for the big approachway to the bridge—and one of the engineers, to his horror, realized that his plan included the demolition of the home of his own mother-in-law. When he told her the news, she screamed and cried and demanded he change the plan. He told her he was helpless to do so; the bridge was inevitable. She died without forgiving him.

  The bridge was inevitable—and it was inevitable they would hate it. They saw the coming bridge not as a sign of progress, but as a symbol of destruction, as an enormous sea monster that soon would rise out of the water and destroy eight hundred buildings and force seven thousand Bay Ridge people to move—all sorts of people: housewives, bartenders, a tugboat skipper, doctors, lawyers, a pimp, teetotalers, drunks, secretaries, a retired light-heavyweight fighter, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl, a family of seventeen children (two dogs and a cat), a dentist who had just spent $13,000 installing new chairs, a vegetarian, a bank clerk, an assistant school principal, and two lovers, a divorced man of forty-one and an unhappily married woman who lived across the street. Each afternoon in his apartment they would meet, these lovers, and make love and wonder what next, wonder if she could ever tell her husband and leave her children. And now, suddenly, this bridge was coming between the lovers, would destroy their neighborhood and their quiet afternoons together, and they had no idea, in 1959, what they would do. What the others did, the angry ones, was join the "Save Bay Ridge" committee, which tried to fight Moses until the bulldozers were bashing down their doors. They signed petitions, and made speeches, and screamed, "This bridge—who needs it?" News photographers took their photographs and reporters interviewed them, quoting their impassioned pleas, and Robert Moses became furious.