Gay Talese - The Bridge: The Building of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge

Gay Talese, 1964.

I kept this in mind when I decided to write a book about the development of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which began with a ground-breaking ceremony along the harbor on August 14, 1959.

The bridge opened for business about five years later, on November 21, 1964, with a traffic jam that was led by fifty-two black limousines bearing politicians and business executives, most of whom had earlier attended a ribbon cutting ceremony. Currently, more than 170,000 vehicles cross the span every weekday, generating a daily revenue of $950,000.

Now, as the Metropolitan Transportation Authority is about to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the bridges opening, this new edition of my original 1964 book, The Bridge , commemorates that milestone. This edition, like the older one, is less a celebration of the bridge than of the high-stepping men who built itthe very men who, incidentally, were not invited to attend the opening-day ceremony fifty years ago.

I have kept in touch with many of these men during the last half-century, and this book represents an invitation to become acquainted with the uninvited.

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THE BOOMERS

They drive into town in big cars, and live in furnished rooms, and drink whiskey with beer chasers, and chase women they will soon forget. They linger only a little while, only until they have built the bridge; then they are off again to another town, another bridge, linking everything but their lives.

They possess none of the foundation of their bridges. They are part circus, part gypsygraceful in the air, restless on the ground; it is as if the wide-open road below lacks for them the clear direction of an eight-inch beam stretching across the sky six hundred feet above the sea.

When there are no bridges to be built, they will build skyscrapers, or highways, or power dams, or anything that promises a challengeand overtime. They will go anywhere, will drive a thousand miles all day and night to be part of a new building boom. They find boom towns irresistible. That is why they are called the boomers.

In appearance, boomers usually are big men, or if not always big, always strong, and their skin is ruddy from all the sun and wind. Some who heat rivets have charred complexions; some who drive rivets are hard of hearing; some who catch rivets in small metal cones have blisters and body burns marking each miss; some who do welding see flashes at night while they sleep. Those who connect steel have deep scars along their shins from climbing columns. Many boomers have mangled hands and fingers sliced off by slipped steel. Most have taken falls and broken a limb or two. All have seen death.

They are cocky men, men of great pride, and at night they brag and build bridges in bars, and sometimes when they are turning to leave, the bartender will yell after them, Hey, you guys, hows about clearing some steel out of here?

Stray women are drawn to them, like them because they have money and no wives within milesthey liked them well enough to have floated a bordello boat beneath one bridge near St. Louis, and to have used upturned hardhats for flowerpots in the red-light district of Paducah.

On weekends some boomers drive hundreds of miles to visit their families, are tender and tolerant, and will deny to the heavens any suggestion that they raise hell on the jobexcept theyll admit it in whispers, half proud, half ashamed, fearful the wives will hear and then any semblance of marital stability will be shattered.