FORTY YEARS AGO ON NOVEMBER 21, 1964
VERRAZANO-NARROWS BRIDGE OPENS TO TRAFFIC
By Theodore W.
Scull
New York was well into becoming
city of bridges when in 1888 the first plans were mounted to construct a link
between Staten Island and Brooklyn (then a separate city) or New York. The
Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had built a relatively modest swing bridge from
New Jersey to Staten Island, and the B&0 wanted the tracks to continue via
a tunnel under Upper New York Bay to the city to replace the cumbersome, slow
car float system where railroad boxes cars were transshipped aboard barges. But
nothing came of it, though ironically, the idea has recently resurfaced to dig
an underwater rail tunnel between Staten Island and Brooklyn to then connect to
the piers and Long Island's rail lines.
Additional plans were mounted in
the 1920s for a Liberty Bridge between Bayonne and Brooklyn or between Staten
Island and Brooklyn but this too died with effective opposition from the War
Department, afraid that if the span was destroyed, New York Harbor and the Navy
Yard would be bottled in. Additional naysayers came from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn
and to a lesser extent, from Staten Island residents where the bridge would
land.
Then the bridge and highway
builder Robert Moses arrived on the scene, who as head of the Triborough Bridge
and Tunnel Authority, took up the cause. A recent set back had prevented him
from building a suspension bridge between the Battery in Lower Manhattan and
Red Hook in Brooklyn, and the outcome was thankfully the Brooklyn-Battery
Tunnel. But he forged ahead with his bridge across the Narrows and hired the
Swiss-born Othmar Ammann to design it. Ammann had been responsible for several
major New York City bridges since planning the George Washington Bridge in the
1920s.
Construction began for what would
be the world's longest suspension bridge at 4,260 feet between the towers,
outclassing the Golden Gate Bridge by 60 feet and the George Washington Bridge
by 760 feet. The width of the span meant that because of the curvature of the
earth, the absolutely vertical 70-story, 693-foot towers were 1 5/8 inches
further apart at the top than at the base.
The construction project was so
large that three steel companies were involved, using three times as much steel
as for the Empire State Building and 142,500 miles of cable wire. The center
span specifications called for 228 feet of clearance between the bridge's
underside and mean high water to allow the liner Queen Mary to pass beneath.
Ironically, the designers of the Queen Mary 2 had to take the bridge height
into account, hence the liner's relatively short funnel. Clearance varies
depending on the season, with summer heat causing the bridge to sag about 12
feet more than in winter.
Queen Mary 2 sailing under the bridge, July 1, 2004.
(Photograph Howard Paulman)
When Robert Moses officiated at
the opening ceremony on November 21, 1964, he forgot to identify the Swiss
engineer by name, and it would be 85-year-old Othmar Amman's last major work.
The name Verrazano was chosen in conjunction with Narrows as a tip of the hat
to the then largely Italian American population of Bay Ridge where some 8,000
residents would be displaced by the bridge and approach roads. Perhaps even
more to the point, Giovanni da Verrazano, a Florentine explorer, sailing for
the King of France, had passed through the Narrows in 1524, the first known
European to do so.
The ferry service operating between St. George, Staten
Island and 69th Street Bay Ridge, Brooklyn closed down on November 25, 1964 and
the diesel electric ferry fleet, built between 1940 and 1947, was dispersed to
the U.S. Coast Guard (2) for service between Manhattan and Governors Island, to
the Chester, PA to bridgeport, NJ route (3) and on one each to Coasta Rica and
Nicaragua. The long backups to cross the Narrows by ferries designed to carry
40 to 50 cars each would be replaced by 12 continuous lanes of roadway that
would eventually see equally long backups at peak travel periods.
The ferry could carry foot
passengers and cyclists, but it was deemed unnecessary to build a pedestrian
and bike path across the new bridge and unwise because of potential suicides.
However, on a single day each year the New York City Marathon draws some 35,000
who cross in a period of a couple hours. Otherwise, it's off-limits to foot
traffic.
A lower deck was added and opened
on June 28, 1969, and then in 1981, the Humber River Bridge in northeast
England took the title of the longest suspension bridge.
The best landside views of the
bridge can be had from Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, especially to the north
of the span above Battery Weed and from Shore Road and the harborside path
parallel to the Shore Parkway in Bay Ridge. To travel over the bridge by bus,
the S53 and S79 operate from 86th St/4th Avenue Bay Ridge
to Staten Island points, and numerous express buses travel between Staten
Island via Brooklyn and Manhattan, with two routes, the X1 and X10, operating
on weekends. When you go, you will be one person in some 200,000 vehicles that
cross everyday.
But there is nothing like sailing
beneath the ever-so-graceful bridge, whether in a tiny sailboat or upon the
deck of a great ocean liner. If aboard the latter, stand behind the funnel and
watch it clear the underside of the lower roadway. If your ship is the Queen
Mary 2, and it is a hot summer's day, you may have your doubts as many
thousands of passengers have before you. While it's still a dozen feet from the
top of the funnel to the underside of the roadway, it appears as mere inches.
Gasps then cheers well up from the awe-struck passengers.
S.S. Rotterdam passengers thrill at the sight
of the liner passing under the bridge - September 16, 1966.
A final perspective is that the
Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, albeit the longest, is just one of 2,098 bridges
within the City of New York and that does not take into account 70 miles of
Transit Authority elevated tracks or Metro-North's Park Avenue two-mile-long
viaduct between 96th and the Harlem River Bridge at 135th
Street. The Brooklyn Bridge may be more famous and is certainly more elaborate
in design, but the V-Z Bridge makes for most graceful arched gateway into the
Port of New York.
Kazakstan, Rotterdam, Doric and Oceanic approaching the bridge
on July 2, 1977 at the end of "The Parade of Liners".
(All photographs from the
collection of the author unless otherwise indicated.)