The New York Times Book of New York
Page 13
FEW THINGS IN NEW YORK LAST FOR 100 years, and fewer still mean as much at the end of a century in this city as they did at the beginning. But the Brooklyn Bridge seems only to grow in importance. It no longer seems as daring an act of engineering as it did in the 19th century, or as overwhelming a presence on the skyline, but on its 100th birthday today it remains as potent, and as beloved, an icon as New York City has. It has always been something apart from other bridges. It was, of course, the first great bridge, the first roadway anywhere in the world to leap across so much water. But now that bigger suspension bridges are commonplace, the Brooklyn Bridge still holds sway over our imaginations.
It stands for many things—for movement, for thrust, for the triumph of man over nature and, ultimately, for a city that prized these qualities over all other things. It is important to remember that the Brooklyn Bridge was completed at the beginning of New York’s great and heroic age. The 1880’s were the beginning of the modern New York of skyscrapers and mass immigration, of explosive growth and intense creativity, and the bridge is the embodiment of that ages spirit.
The bridge did not make modern New York happen, of course, but the fact that the bridge itself happened—that New York City could build a monument that was so brilliant a synthesis of art and technology—served as a convenient symbol of the city’s new power as a world capital. At the end of the 19th century, New York was a city that felt itself rapidly becoming the center of the world, and the bridge that joined it to its neighbor, Brooklyn—then a separate city—seemed to epitomize its potential.
It was not merely that the bridge crossed the East River and suddenly made ferries obsolete. A lesser structure might have done the same. The bridge was so much more than a roadway; it was, by itself, the tallest and grandest manmade thing in the city. The bridges Gothic towers of granite were New York’s first skyscrapers, for in 1883 they stood high above everything else on the skyline; its roadway provided a spectacular panorama of the city that could be obtained nowhere else. To see the city and the river from the Brooklyn Bridge was like flying.
But the genius of John Roebling’s design goes beyond even this. The bridge is an object of startling beauty. As suspension bridges go, it was not even approached until the George Washington Bridge half a century later and the Golden Gate Bridge a few years after that. It is not quite as graceful as these newer bridges; one could not say of the Brooklyn Bridge, as Le Corbusier said of the George Washington, here, finally, steel architecture begins to laugh. The Brooklyn Bridge is more somber, more blunt and hard; those towers of stone do not laugh, and neither do the steel cables in their exquisite, lyrical webbed pattern.
Honors for Bridges Many Take for Granted
By GLENN COLLINS | September 16, 2008
The Manhattan Bridge celebrated its centennial in 2009.
THOUGH MORE MARINE TRAFFIC CROSSES under it than under any other city drawbridge, most drivers who traverse the humble Pelham Bay Bridge in the Bronx barely take notice. This buff-and-blue span in Pelham Bay Park—a heavily traveled approach to City Island—is certainly not a bridge to nowhere. But it is only a bit player in the transportation firmament of bridges with star names like Brooklyn and George Washington.
Yet the centennial of this workhorse is about to be greeted with a brass marching band. There will be a color guard, a parade of Clydesdales followed by a horse and carriage, a canoe flotilla and a procession of dignitaries expected to include the Bronx borough president, Adolfo Carrión Jr., and the city parks commissioner, Adrian Benepe. There will be speeches. And the clamshell drawbridge will be ceremonially opened as a fireboat spouts in red, white and blue.
But why?
“Our bridges get no respect,” said M. Barry Schneider, founder of the New York City Bridge Centennial Commission, which has given itself the mission of celebrating the 100th anniversary of six city bridges from 2008 to 2010. Before this year the commission had little more than a logo (a jaunty suspension bridge in blue and gray), but now has two centennial celebrations under its belt: the University Heights Bridge (January) and the Borden Avenue Bridge (March).
That will be followed by the big bash for the Pelham Bay Bridge (2008) and, later, honors for the Queensboro Bridge (2009), the Manhattan Bridge (also 2009) and the Madison Avenue Bridge (2010).
The revelry has not been inspired by any official arm of the city government, but rather, by a nonprofit group that has won enthusiastic cooperation from the borough presidents’ offices, the mayor’s office, the city’s parks department and its Department of Transportation. Mr. Schneider created the commission with his wife, Judith, in 2006. “I picked the name ‘commission’ so we could all be commissioners,” he said with a laugh.
His agenda, however, is entirely serious. “We take our infrastructure for granted,” said the 73-year-old Mr. Schneider, a retired advertising executive who is a current member and former president of Community Board 8. “And if we don’t take care, we’ll wind up with bridges that fall down.”
His View From the Bridge
By JAKE MOONEY | December 30, 2007
Because Ben Cipriano is a wisecracking kind of guy, maybe it’s best to begin his story in the form of a joke: How many electricians does it take to screw in all the light bulbs on the Brooklyn Bridge? The answer is six. Not much of a punch line, but it has the advantage of being factually correct. Their names are Jerry, Tommy, Richie, Mike and Bobby, plus Mr. Cipriano, the boss, who has been climbing bridge cables for more than 20 years and does not plan to stop any time soon.
Mr. Cipriano is 58, and he got a job with the city’s Department of Transportation in 1985 after serving in Vietnam, driving a taxi and working as a laborer on construction sites, where he couldn’t help noticing that electricians never seemed to have to carry around heavy tools and trash barrels. He learned the trade and started working in a private shop, then saw an ad for a job working on the city’s bridges.
They were low bridges at first, on Third Avenue over the Harlem River or Hamilton Avenue over the Gowanus Canal, where the view was somewhat less inspiring.
After two years, he hit the big time: the four East River bridges—the Brooklyn, the Manhattan, the Williamsburg and the Queensboro—where his crew maintained power supplies, controls, clocks and, yes, light bulbs. Some time later he was put in charge of them. He doesn’t have to climb bridge cables anymore, but he often does anyway. For one thing, it beats sitting in the office. For another, the view is unparalleled.
We check in with Mr. Cipriano just now because of the mayor’s announcement this month that a host of city landmarks, including the Brooklyn Bridge, will soon be outfitted with new, energy-efficient bulbs. The bulbs—light-emitting diodes, actually—should last much longer than the existing bulbs, which themselves last for years. One wonders what this means for the future of bridge-top bulb-changing.
Do not worry, though, about Ben Cipriano. There is plenty of other work up there, and no one is sure how the new lights will respond to the extreme weather conditions. He will be watching closely, as he already does, whenever he drives past when the lights are on, or sees one of his bridges while watching television with his family.
“Maybe I should get a hobby,” he said. But getting the lights right is important to him, and the problem with the current lights, 100-watt mercury vapor bulbs, is that they turn green as they start to burn out. “Even if you have a couple of them out—160 bulbs are up there—people are going to notice,” Mr. Cipriano said. “They don’t look so hot if you have some bright ones and some green ones and so on and so forth.”
Up on top of the bridge, Mr. Cipriano still marvels at it all.
He doesn’t remember his first glimpse of the Brooklyn Bridge, but he remembers pulling into New York Harbor, on a ship called the Volcania, as an 8-year-old immigrant from Sicily. He was right up in the front of the boat with his little brother, who was pushing a little to get them to the dock quicker.
Up on top of the bridge, Mr. Cipriano still marvels at it
all, this time from a place with an unobstructed 360-degree view. “People would pay to go up there,” he said, “and we’re getting paid to go up there.”
He has, in his pocket, a little camera: 35-millimeter before, digital now. He has spent enough time looking at New York to know what he likes. “No clouds is no good,” he said. “Overcast is no good, obviously. But if you have clouds in the background with the buildings, it’s just a great picture.
R.F.K. Bridge May Meet Fate Of Avenue of the Americas
By JAMES BARRON | June 6, 2008
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke during the ceremony which renamed the TriBorough Bridge after his father, former NY Senator Robert F. Kennedy.
WHAT’S IN A NAME, ANYWAY? WOULD THAT which we call the Triborough Bridge by any other name—oh, let’s skip the Shakespeare and get to the point. Would anybody call the Triborough anything but the Triborough?
The short answer seems to be, no.
“It connects three boroughs,” said Susan Breslaoukhov, the manager of a French Connection clothing store in Rockefeller Center. “That’s self-explanatory. I expect people will keep calling it Triborough for a long time.”
The what-will-they-call-it question came up after the State Assembly voted to rename the Triborough the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge, for the former attorney general who was elected to the United States Senate from New York in 1964. He died 40 years ago Friday, after being shot in Los Angeles, just after he won the California Democratic primary.
But some said the renaming could be confusing for commuters. “It’s been that way for a million years,” said Morton Mozzar, an automobile-service consultant in Queens. “If they had renamed it right afterwards, O.K., like they did with J.F.K. Airport.” (The airport was called Idlewild but was renamed after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. It only seems as if the Triborough has been around for a million years. Next month it will have been open for 72 years.)
Some New Yorkers pointed to name changes that did not take. Consider the Marine Parkway-Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge, as it has been known for 30 years in honor of the former Brooklyn Dodgers first baseman and Mets manager.
Or what about renaming the Miller Highway the Joe DiMaggio? Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Gov. George E. Pataki agreed to that in 1999, soon after DiMaggio’s death.
The Miller Highway? Nobody called it that in the first place (except, perhaps, relatives of Julius Miller, the Manhattan borough president when the first section was opened in 1930). It ran from West 72nd Street to Battery Place and was not to be confused with the Henry Hudson Parkway, which runs north from 72nd.
“And what about the Thruway?” asked Mimi Marenberg of Airmont, N.Y. “Its name is the Thomas E. Dewey Thruway, but who calls it that? No one. We spend money on big signs, renaming these things, but all it does is generate money for the sign people.”
And Avenue of the Americas, that avenue’s official name for decades?
“I call it Sixth Avenue,” said Ms. Breslaoukhov, the clothing-store manager, whose shop is at 1270 Avenue of the you-know-what. “If I say ‘Avenue of the Americas,’ people get confused and say, ‘What?’”
First Week of Operation Reveals The Holland Tunnel, Marvel of Engineering
By WALDO WALKER | November 20, 1927
An early plan of the Holland tunnel, which took seven years to construct. Today, the annual average daily traffic is close to 100,000.
IN THE WEEK SINCE THE HOLLAND TUNNEL was opened to vehicular traffic it has more than justified all the claims made for its engineering perfection. Just as the tubes were bored out from either shore so unerringly that the two ends met to a friction of an inch in midriver, so everything planned by the engineers for the finished tunnel worked out.
The first week of operation accordingly answered the momentous questions that arose during the tunnel’s construction. Would the $48,400,000 the tunnel cost provide the expected traffic relief for miles up and down the river and for miles inland? How would the public take to the new utility, and, if as heartily as anticipated, how would the twin tubes themselves behave under pressure? Would the ventilation system eliminate the deadly carbon monoxide gas discharged from the automobiles?
At the very outset the Holland Tunnel withstood a traffic shock that it probably will not have to sustain again in a long time. The opening day developed what is called the greatest single traffic rush ever seen along the Hudson River. Exactly 51,748 public cars streamed through the tubes during the first 24 hours.
Thereafter the number of “sightseers” decreased and the tunnel traffic was reduced to a volume large enough to pay expenses and leave something over to put in the bank. The estimated “maximum daily traffic” was put at 46,000 cars, but after the sensational opening day the weekday average dropped to around 18,000 cars. However, traffic experts say this falling off really means nothing as an index of the tunnel’s future. They predict it will prove only temporary, and that there will be steady gains as motorists discover the new travel route.
On the Job, Way Under Water
By GRETCHEN KURTZ | April 13, 2003
ON PAPER, JOANNE WILLIAMS HAS THE OFFICE everyone dreams of—not far from the water, with lots of windows and no chatty co-workers dropping by. But her location is one of the last places that most people want to find themselves these days: inside the Lincoln Tunnel. Not that Ms. Williams, 49, officially a tunnel and bridge agent with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, is complaining.
“They told us in training that this is a dangerous job,” she said. “If you’re not prepared, then don’t do it.”
The job seemed only mildly dangerous when she signed up 17 years ago. Ms. Williams’s biggest worry back then was what it would be like working 97 feet under water. But since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and subsequent threats to both the Lincoln and the Holland Tunnels, things have changed. Their primary role—to keep traffic moving—has remained the same since the job was created in 1973. To keep traffic moving is not an easy task considering that nearly 21 million vehicles, about 60,000 on an average weekday, passed through the tunnel’s three tubes to New York City last year.
Agents monitor traffic 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The agents typically sit in a slightly crouched position inside tiny electric-powered catwalk cars, parked inside booths of about 4 by 8 feet that are placed strategically where most accidents occur in the tunnel. When traffic stops, the agent on duty leaves the booth in the catwalk car and rides to the scene. Once there, the agents do everything in their power to solve the problem. If the vehicle has a flat, they fix it. If it is stalled, they jump-start it or call for a tow. If the driver or a passenger needs first aid, they administer it. The agents are given three months of classroom and on-the-job training in everything from firefighting to cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
“The best part of the job is the immediate satisfaction,” tunnel agent Bob Murphy said. “When you show up, people want you there.”
E-Z Pass to Start At Hudson River Tunnels
By DAVID M. HALBFINGER | October 27, 1997
JUST AFTER MIDNIGHT TONIGHT, AN ELECtronic cordon around New York City will be complete when the E-Z Pass system is switched on at the toll plazas of the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels. For the first time, commuters will be able to drive to and from the city by any route without having to dig for dollar bills, scrounge for coins or hold up traffic asking for a receipt.
Lest anyone hope, however, that radio reports of “15-minute delays at the inbound Holland Tunnel” or “25-minute delays at the Lincoln Tunnel helix” will quickly fade into memory, officials with the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey warned that the E-Z Pass system is unlikely to ease morning rush-hour traffic at the two tunnels any time soon.
Two of the 13 lanes at the Lincoln Tunnel will be dedicated for E-Z Pass users, as will at least one of the nine lanes at the Holland Tunnel, although all lanes at both tunnels will be able to read the E-Z Pass transponders. E-Z Pass users—including infrequent t
ravelers—will save 10 percent off the $4 toll, the same discount regular commuters now enjoy.
“I got mine,” shouted John Canizaro of Lodi, N.J., waving his audiocassette-size transponder as he rolled through a toll lane.
But Ellen Seidman, an editor at Glamour magazine who lives in Hoboken, N.J., said she had heard stories of criminals breaking into cars and stealing the E-Z Pass transponders. “It’s another thing to worry about,” she said. “I’ve left the lights on in my car a few times. I don’t want to have to think about this, too.”
E-Z Pass system is unlikely to ease morning rush-hour traffic.
How to Beat a Writer Across Town
By CLYDE HABERMAN | November 1, 2002
Traffic congestion is typical along Park Avenue. More than half the people driving to and from work in Manhattan are not from the suburbs.
FOR A PERSONAL CHALLENGE, NOTHING compares to the New York City Marathon. Take it from someone who has completed the 26.2-mile course several times. Grinding along the streets of the five boroughs requires reservoirs of endurance, discipline, patience, resourcefulness and good cheer.
I really should try running it one of these days.
The preference here is to drive the marathon route, a ritual that was performed on Wednesday morning for the fourth time in the last eight autumns. As ever, the reason for schlepping through town in a rented car was to see if the mysteries of New York traffic had changed. (If you are now thinking that this exercise was nothing but a newspaper gimmick, I have only one thing to say to you: you’re right.)
It took me 2 hours and 44 minutes on Wednesday to get from the starting point, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, to the finish line at Tavern on the Green in Central Park. Records kept by New York Road Runners show that 195 men and women ran last year’s marathon in less time.