by Gay Talese
He wrote letters to a newspaper publisher saying that the reporter had distorted the truth, had lied, had emphasized only the bad part, not the good part, of destroying people's homes. Most people in Brooklyn did not, in 1959, understand the good part, and so they held on to their homes with determination. But sooner or later, within the next year or so, they let go. One by one they went, and soon the house lights went out for the last time, and then moving vans rolled in, and then the bulldozers came crashing up and the walls crumbled down, and the roofs caved in and everything was hidden in an avalanche of dust—a sordid scene to be witnessed by the hold-out next door, and soon he, too, would move out, and then another, and another. And that is how it went on each block, in each neighborhood, until, finally, even the most determined hold-out gave in because, when a block is almost completely destroyed, and one is all alone amid the chaos, strange and unfamiliar fears sprout up: the fear of being alone in a neighborhood that is dying; the fear of a band of young vagrants who occasionally would roam through the rubble smashing windows or stealing doors, or picket fences, light fixtures, or shrubbery, or picking at broken pictures or leftover love letters; fear of the derelicts who would sleep in the shells of empty apartments or hanging halls; fear of the rats that people said would soon be crawling up from the shattered sinks or sewers because, it was explained, rats also were being dispossessed in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
One of the last hold-outs was a hazel-eyed, very pretty brunette divorced woman of forty-two named Florence Campbell. She left after the lovers, after the dentist, and after the former Ziegfeld Follies girl, Bessie Gros Dempsey, who had to pack up her 350 plumed hats and old scrapbooks; she left after the crazy little man who had been discovered alone in an empty apartment house because, somehow, he never heard the bulldozers beneath him and had no idea that a bridge was being built.
She left after the retired prizefighter, Freddy Fredericksen, who had only lost twice before, and after Mr. and Mrs. John G. Herbert, the parents of seventeen children—although Florence Campbell's leaving was nowhere as complex as the Herberts'. It had taken them twelve trips to move all their furniture, all the bicycles, sleds, dishes, dogs to their new house a little more than a mile away—twelve trips and sixteen hours; and when they had finally gotten everything there, Mr. Herbert, a Navy Yard worker, discovered that the cat was missing. So early the next morning he sent two sons back to the old house, and they discovered the cat beneath the porch. They also discovered an old axe there. And for the next hour they used the axe to destroy everything they could of the old house; they smashed windows, walls, the floors, they smashed their old bedroom, the kitchen shelves, and the banister of the porch, where they used to gather on summer nights, and they smashed without knowing exactly why, only knowing, as they took turns swinging, that they felt a little wild and gleeful and sad and mad as they smashed—and then, too tired to continue, they retrieved the cat from under the smashed porch and they left their old home for the last time.
In the case of Florence Campbell, it took more than even a murder to make her abandon her home. She had been living, since her divorce, with her young son in a sixty-four-dollar-a-month spacious apartment. It was difficult for her to find anything like it at a rental she could afford. The relocation agent, who had lost patience with her for turning down apartments he considered suitable but she considered too expensive, now forgot about her, and she was on her own to search alone at night after she had returned from her bookkeeping job with the Whitehall Club in Manhattan.
Then one morning she started smelling a strange odor in the apartment. She thought perhaps that her son had gone fishing the day before, after school, and had dumped his catch in the dumbwaiter. He denied it, and the next night, when the odor became worse, she telephoned the police. They soon discovered that the elderly man living on the first floor, the only other tenant in the house, had three days before murdered his wife with shotgun bullets and now, dazed and silent, he was sitting next to the corpse, empty whiskey bottles at his feet.
"Lady, do me a favor," the police sergeant said to Florence Campbell. "Get out of this block, will ya?"
She said she would, but she still could not find an apartment during her searchings. She had no relatives she could move in with, no friends within the neighborhood, because they had all moved. When she came home at midnight from apartment hunting, she would find the hall dark—somebody was always stealing the light bulb—or she might stumble over a drunken derelict sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the downstairs door.
A few nights after the sergeant's warning she was awakened from sleep by the sounds of shuffling feet outside her door and the pounding of fists against the wall. Her son, in the adjoining bedroom, jumped up, grabbed a shotgun he kept in his closet, and ran out into the hall. But it was completely dark, the light bulb had been stolen again. He tripped and Florence Campbell screamed.
A strange man raced up the steps to the roof. She called the police. They came quickly but could find no one on the roof. The police sergeant again told her to leave, and she nodded, weeping, that she would. The next day she was too nervous to go to work, and so she went to a nearby bar to get a drink and told the bartender what had happened, and, very excited, he told her he knew of an apartment that was available a block away for sixty-eight dollars a month. She ran to the address, got the apartment—and the landlord could not understand why, after she got it, she began to cry.
CHAPTER THREE
SURVIVAL OF
THE FITTEST
The bridge began as bridges always begin—silently. It began with underwater investigations and soil studies and survey sheets; and when the noise finally started, on January 16, 1959, nobody in Brooklyn or Staten Island heard it.
It started with the sound of a steam pile driver ramming a pipe thirty-six inches in diameter into the silt of a small island off the Brooklyn shore. The island held an old battered bastion called Fort Lafayette, which had been a prison during the Civil War, but now it was about to be demolished, and the island would only serve as a base for one of the bridge's two gigantic towers.
Nobody heard the first sounds of the bridge because they were soft and because the island was six hundred feet off the Brooklyn shore; but even if it had been closer, the sounds would not have risen above the rancor and clamor of the people, for when the drilling began, the people still were protesting, still were hopeful that the bridge would never be built. They were aware that the city had not yet formally condemned their property—but that came three months later. On April 30, 1959, in Brooklyn Supreme Court, Justice J. Vincent Keogh—who would later go to jail on charges of sharing in a bribe to fix another case—signed the acquisition papers, and four hundred Bay Ridge residents suddenly stopped protesting and submitted in silence.
The next new noise was the spirited, high-stepping sound of a marching band and the blaring platitudes of politicians echoing over a sun-baked parade ground on August 14, 1959—it was groundbreaking day for the bridge, with the ceremony held, wisely, on the Staten Island side. Over in Brooklyn, when a reporter asked State Senator William T Conklin for a reaction, the Bay Ridge representative snapped, "It is not a ground-breaking—to many it will be heartbreaking." And then, slowly and more emotionally, he continued: "Any public official attending should always be identified in the future with the cruelty that has been inflicted on the community in the name of progress."
Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York had been invited to attend the ceremony in Staten Island, but he sent a telegram expressing regret that a prior engagement made it impossible for him to be there. He designated Assembly Speaker Joseph Carlino to read his message. But Mr. Carlino did not show up. Robert Moses had to read it.
As Mr. Moses expressed all the grand hope of the future, a small airplane chartered by the Staten Island Chamber of Commerce circled overhead with an advertising banner that urged "Name it the Staten Island Bridge." Many people opposed the name Verrazano—which had been loudly recommended by the Italian Fl
istorical Society of America and its founder, John N. La Corte—because they could not spell it. Others, many of them Irish, did not want a bridge named after an Italian, and they took to calling it the "Guinea Gangplank." Still others advocated simpler names—"The Gateway Bridge," "Freedom Bridge," "Neptune Bridge," "New World Bridge," "The Narrows Bridge." One of the last things ever written by Ludwig Bemelmans was a letter to the New York Times expressing the hope that the name "Verrazano" be dropped in favor of a more "romantic" and "tremendous" name, and he suggested calling it the "Commissioner Moses Bridge." But the Italian Historical Society, boasting a large membership of emotional voters, was not about to knuckle under, and finally after months of debate and threats, a compromise was reached in the name "Verrazano-Narrows Bridge."
The person making the least amount of noise about the bridge all this time was the man who was creating it—Othmar H. Ammann, a lean, elderly, proper man in a high starched collar, who now, in his eightieth year, was recognized as probably the greatest bridge engineer in the world. His monumental achievement so far, the one that soared above dozens of others, was the George Washington Bridge, the sight of which had quietly thrilled him since its completion in 1931. Since then, when he and his wife drove down along the Hudson River from upstate New York and suddenly saw the bridge looming in the distance, stretching like a silver rainbow over the river between New York and New Jersey, they often gently bowed and saluted it.
"That bridge is his firstborn, and it was a difficult birth," his wife once explained. "He'll always love it best." And Othmar Ammann, though reluctant to reveal any sentimentality, nevertheless once described its effect upon him. "It is as if you have a beautiful daughter," he said, "and you are the father."
But now the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge presented Ammann with an even larger task. And to master its gigantic design he would even have to take into account the curvature of the earth. The two 693-foot towers, though exactly perpendicular to the earth's surface, would have to be one and five-eighths inches farther apart at their summits than at their bases.
Though the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge would require 188,000 tons of steel—three times the amount used in the Empire State Building—Ammann knew that it would be an ever restless structure, would always sway slightly in the wind. Its steel cables would swell when hot and contract when cold, and its roadway would be twelve feet closer to the water in summer than in winter. Sometimes, on long hot summer days, the sun would beat down on one side of the structure with such intensity that it might warp the steel slightly, making the bridge a fraction lower on its hot side than on its shady side. So, Ammann knew, any precision measuring to be done during the bridge's construction would have to be done at night.
From the start of a career that began in 1902, when he graduated from the Swiss Federal Polytechnic Institute with a degree in civil engineering, Ammann had made few mistakes. He had been a careful student, a perfectionist. He had witnessed the rise and fall of other men's creations, had seen how one flaw in mathematics could ruin an engineer's reputation for life—and he was determined it would not happen to him.
Othmar Hermann Ammann had been born on March 26, 1879, in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, into a family that had been established in Schaffhausen since the twelfth century His father had been a prominent manufacturer and his forebears had been physicians, clergymen, lawyers, government leaders, but none had been engineers, and few had shared his enthusiasm for bridges.
There had always been a wooden bridge stretching from the village of Schaffhausen across the Rhine, the most famous of them being built at a length of 364 feet in the 1 700s by a Swiss named Hans Ulrich Grubenmaim. It had been destroyed by the French in 1799, but had been replaced by others, and as a boy Othmar Ammann saw bridges as a symbol of challenge and a monument to beauty.
In 1904, after working for a time in Germany as a design engineer, Ammann came to the United States—which, after slumbering for many decades in a kind of dark age of bridge design, was now finally experiencing a renaissance. American bridges were getting bigger and safer; American engineers were now bolder than any in the world.
There were still disasters, but it was nothing like it had been in the middle 1800s, when as many as forty bridges might collapse in a single year, a figure that meant that for every four bridges put up one would fall down. Usually it was a case of engineers not knowing precisely the stress and strain a bridge could withstand, and also there were cases of contractors being too cost-conscious and willing to use inferior building materials. Many bridges in those days, even some railroad bridges, were made of timber. Others were made of a new material, wrought iron, and nobody knew exactly how it would hold up until two disasters—one in Ohio, the other in Scotland—proved its weakness.
The first occurred on a snowy December night in 1877 when a train from New York going west over the Ashtabula Bridge in Ohio suddenly crumbled the bridge's iron beams and then, one by one, the rail cars fell into the icy waters, killing ninety-two people. Two years later, the Firth of Tay Bridge in Scotland collapsed under the strain of a locomotive pulling six coaches and a brakeman's van. It had been a windy Sunday night, and seventy-five people were killed, and religious extremists blamed the railroad for running trains on Sunday But engineers realized that it was the wrought iron that was wrong, and these two bridge failures hastened the acceptance of steel—which has a working strength twenty-five percent greater than wrought iron—and thus began the great era that would influence young Othmar Ammann.
This era drew its confidence from two spectacular events— the completion in 1874 of the world's first steel bridge, a triple arch over the Mississippi River at St. Louis designed and built by James Buchanan Eads; and the completion in 1883 of the Brooklyn Bridge, first steel cable suspension span, designed by John Roebling and, upon his tragic death, completed by his son, Washington Roebling. Both structures would shape the future course in American bridge-building, and would establish a foundation of knowledge, a link of trial and error, that would guide every engineer through the twentieth century. The Roeblings and James Buchanan Eads were America's first heroes in high steel.
James B. Eads was a flamboyant and cocky Indiana boy whose first engineering work was raising sunken steamers from the bottom of the Mississippi. He also was among the first to explore the river's bed in a diver's suit, and he realized, when it came time for him to start constructing the foundations for his St. Louis bridge, that he could not rely on the Mississippi River soil for firmness, because it had a peculiar and powerful shifting movement.
So he introduced to America the European pneumatic caisson— an airtight enclosure that would allow men to work underwater without being hindered by the shifting tides. Eventually, as the caisson sank deeper and deeper and the men dug up more and more of the riverbed below, the bridge's foundation could penetrate the soft sand and silt and could settle solidly on the hard rock beneath the Mississippi. Part of this delicate operation was helped by Eads's invention—a sand pump that could lift and eject gravel, silt, and sand from the caisson's chamber.
Before Eads's bridge would be finished, however, 352 workmen would suffer from a strange new ailment—caisson's disease or "the bends"—and twelve men would die from it, and two would remain crippled for life. But from the experience and observations made by James Eads's physician, Dr. Jaminet, who spent time in the caisson with the men and became temporarily paralyzed himself, sufficient knowledge was obtained to greatly reduce the occurrence of the ailment on future jobs.
When the St. Louis steel bridge was finished, James Eads, to show its strength, ran fourteen locomotives across each of the bridge's three arches. Later a fifteen-mile parade marched across it, President Grant applauded from the reviewing stand, General Sherman drove in the last spike on the Illinois side, and Andrew Carnegie, who had been selling bonds for the project, made his first fortune. The bridge was suddenly instrumental in the development of St. Louis as the most important city on the Mississippi River, and it helped develop t
he transcontinental railroad systems. It was credited with "the winning of the West" and was pictured on a United States stamp in 1898; and in 1920 James Buchanan Eads became the first engineer elected to the American Hall of Fame.
He died an unhappy man. A project he envisioned across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec did not work out.
John Augustus Roebling was a studious German youth born in 1806, in a small town called Muhlhausen, to a tobacco merchant who smoked more than he sold and to a mother who prayed he would someday amount to more than his father. Largely through her ambition and thrift he received a fine education in architecture and engineering in Berlin, and later he worked for the Prussian government building roads and bridges.
But there was little opportunity for originality, and so at the age of twenty-five he came to America and soon, in Pennsylvania, he was working as a surveyor for the railroads and canals. And one day, while observing how the hemp rope that hauled canal boats often broke, John Roebling began to experiment with a more durable fiber, and soon he was twisting iron wire into the hemp—an idea that would eventually lead him and his family into a prosperous industry that today, in Trenton, New Jersey, is the basis for the Roebling Company—world's largest manufacturer of ware rope and cable.
But in those days it led John Roebling toward his more immediate goal, the construction of suspension bridges. He had seen smaller suspensions, hung with iron chains, during his student days in Germany, and he wondered if the suspension bridge might not be more graceful, longer, and stronger with iron wire rope, maybe even strong enough to support rail cars.
