The Bridge

by Gay Talese

  But if he pushes too hard, resulting in accidents or death, then he is in trouble with the bridge company While the bridge company encourages competition between gangs, because it wants to see the bridge finished fast, wants to see traffic jams up there and hear the clink of coins at toll gates, it does not want any accidents or deaths to upset the schedule or get into the newspapers or degrade the company's safety record with the insurance men. So the pusher is caught in the middle. If he is not lucky, if there is death in his gang, he may be blamed and be dropped back into the gang himself, and another workman will be promoted to pusher. But if he is lucky and his gang works fast and well, then he someday might become an assistant superintendent on the bridge—a "walkin' boss."

  The walkin' boss, of which there usually are four on a big bridge where four hundred or five hundred men are employed, commands a section of the span. One walkin' boss may be in charge of the section between an anchorage and a tower, another from that tower to the center of the span, a third from the center of the span to the other tower, the fourth from that tower to the other anchorage— and all they do all day is walk up and down, up and down, strutting like gamecocks, a look of suspicion in their eyes as they glance sideways to see that the pushers are pushing, the punks are punking, and the young steel connectors are not behaving like acrobats on the cables.

  The thing that concerns walkin' bosses most is that they impress the boss, who is the superintendent, and is comparable to a top sergeant. The superintendent is usually the toughest, loudest, foulest-mouthed, best bridgeman on the whole job, and he lets everybody know it. He usually spends most of his day at a headquarters shack built along the shore near the anchorage of the bridge, there to communicate with the engineers, designers, and other white-collar officers from the bridge company. The walkin' bosses up on the bridge represent him and keep him informed, but about two or three times a day the superintendent will leave his shack and visit the bridge, and when he struts across the span the whole thing seems to stiffen. The men are all heads down at work, the punks seem petrified.

  The superintendent selected to supervise the construction of the span and the building of the cables for the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was a six-foot, fifty-nine-year-old, hot-tempered man named John Murphy, who, behind his back, was known as "Hard Nose" or "Short Fuse."

  He was a broad-shouldered and chesty man with a thin strong nose and jaw, with pale blue eyes and thinning white hair— but the most distinguishing thing about him was his red face, a face so red that if he ever blushed, which he rarely did, nobody would know it. The red hard face—the result of forty years' booming in the high wind and hot sun of a hundred bridges and skyscrapers around America—gave Murphy the appearance of always being boiling mad at something, which he usually was.

  He had been born, like so many boomers, in a small town without horizons—in this case, Rexton, a hamlet of three hundred in New Brunswick, Canada. The flu epidemic that had swept through Rexton in the spring of 1919, when Murphy was sixteen years old, killed his mother and father, an uncle and two cousins, and left him largely responsible for the support of his five younger brothers and sisters. So he went to work driving timber in Maine, and, when that got slow, he moved down to Pennsylvania and learned the bridge business, distinguishing himself as a steel connector because he was young and fearless. He was considered one of the best connectors on the George Washington Bridge, which he worked on in 1930 and 1931, and since then he had gone from one job to another, booming all the way up to Alaska to put a bridge across the Tanana River, and then back east again on other bridges and buildings.

  In 1959 he was the superintendent in charge of putting up the Pan Am, the fifty-nine-story skyscraper in mid-Manhattan, and after that he was appointed to head the Verrazano job by the American Bridge Company, a division of United States Steel that had the contract to put up the bridge's span and steel cables.

  When Hard Nose Murphy arrived at the bridge site in the early spring of 1962, the long, undramatic, sloppy, yet so vital part of bridge construction—the foundations—was finished, and the two 693-foot towers were rising.

  The foundation construction for the two towers, done by J. Rich Steers, Inc., and the Frederick Snare Corporation, if not an aesthetic operation that would appeal to the adventurers in high steel, nevertheless was a most difficult and challenging task, because the two caissons sunk in the Narrows had been among the largest ever built. They were 229 feet long and 129 feet wide, and each had sixty-six circular dredging holes—each hole being seventeen feet in diameter— and, from a distance, the concrete caissons looked like gigantic chunks of Swiss cheese.

  Building the caisson that would support the pedestal which would in turn bear the foundation for the Staten Island tower had required 47,000 cubic yards of concrete, and before it settled on firm sand 105 feet below the surface, 81,500 cubic yards of muck and sand had to be lifted up through the dredging holes by clamshell buckets suspended from cranes. The caisson for the Brooklyn tower had to be sunk to about 170 feet below sea level, had required 83,000 cubic yards of concrete, and 143,600 cubic yards of muck and sand had to be dredged up.

  The foundations, the ones that anchor the bridge to Staten Island and Brooklyn, were concrete blocks the height of a ten-story building, each triangular-shaped, and holding, within their hollows, all the ends of the cable strands that stretch across the bridge. These two anchorages, built by The Arthur A. Johnson Corporation and Peter Kiewit Sons' Company, hold back the 240,000,000-pound pull of the bridge's four cables.

  It had taken a little more than two years to complete the four foundations, and it had been a day-and-night grind, unappreciated by sidewalk superintendents and, in fact, protested by two hundred Staten Islanders on March 29, 1961; they claimed, in a petition presented to Richmond County District Attorney John M. Braisted, Jr., that the foundation construction between 6 P.M. and 6 A.M. was ruining the sleep of a thousand persons within a one-mile radius. In Brooklyn, the Bay Ridge neighborhood also was cluttered with cranes and earth-moving equipment as work on the approachway to the bridge continued, and the people still were hating Moses, and some had cried foul after he had awarded a $20,000,000 contract, without competitive bidding, to a construction company that employs his son-in-law. All concerned in the transaction immediately denied there was anything irregular about it.

  But when Hard Nose Murphy arrived, things were getting better; the bridge was finally crawling up out of the water, and the people had something to see—some visible justification for all the noise at night—and in the afternoons some old Brooklyn men with nothing to do would line the shore watching the robin-red towers climb higher and higher.

  The towers had been made in sections in steel plants and had been floated by barge to the bridge site. The Harris Structural Steel Company had made the Brooklyn tower, while Bethlehem made the Staten Island tower—both to O. H. Ammann's specifications. After the tower sections had arrived at the bridge site, they were lifted up by floating derricks anchored alongside the tower piers. After the first three tiers of each tower leg had been locked into place, soaring at this point to about 120 feet, the floating derricks were replaced by "creepers"-—derricks, each with a lifting capacity of more than one hundred tons, that crept up the towers on tracks bolted to the sides of the tower legs. As the towers got higher, the creepers were raised until, finally, the towers had reached their pinnacle of 693 feet.

  While the construction of towers possesses the element of danger, it is not really much different from building a tall building or an enormous lighthouse; after the third or fourth story is built, it is all the same the rest of the way up. The real art and drama in bridge building begins after the towers are up; then the men have to reach out from these towers and begin to stretch the cables and link the span over the sea.

  This would be Murphy's problem, and as he sat in one of the Harris Company's boats on this morning in May 1962, idly watching from the water as the Staten Island tower loomed up to its tenth tier,
he was saying to one of the engineers in the boat, "You know, every time I see a bridge in this stage, I can't help but think of all the problems we got coming next—all the mistakes, all the cursing, all the goddamned sweat and the death we gotta go through to finish this thing . . ."

  The engineer nodded, and then they both watched quietly again as the derricks, swelling at the veins, continued to hoist large chunks of steel through the sky.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  KEEPING

  THE WHEEL

  FROM BENNY

  After the towers had been finished in the winter of 1962, the cable spinning would begin—and with it the mistakes, the cursing, the sweat, the death that Murphy had anticipated.

  The spinning began in March of 1963. Six hundred men were up on the job, but Benny Olson, who had been the best cable-man in America for thirty years, was not among them. He had been grounded. And though he had fumed, fretted, and cursed for three days after he'd gotten the news, it did not help. He was sixty-six years old—too old to be climbing catwalks six hundred feet in the sky, and too slow to be dodging those spinning wheels and snapping wires.

  So he was sent four miles up the river to the bridge company's steelyard near Bayonne, New Jersey, where he was made supervisor of a big tool shed and was given some punks to order around. But each day Olson would gaze down the river and see the towers in the distance, and he could sense the sounds, the sights, the familiar sensation that pervades a bridge just before the men begin to string steel thread across the sea. And Benny Olson knew, as did most others, that he had taught the cable experts most of what they knew and had inspired new techniques in the task, and everybody knew, too, that Benny Olson, at sixty-six, was now a legend securely spun into the lore and links of dozens of big bridges between Staten Island and San Francisco.

  He was a skinny little man. He weighed about 135 pounds, stood five feet six inches; he was nearly bald on the top of his head, though some strands grew long and loose down the back of his neck, and he had tiny blue eyes, rimmed with steel glasses, and a long nose. Everybody referred to him as "Benny the Mouse." In his long career he had been a pusher, a walkin' boss, and a superintendent. He compensated for his tiny stature by cutting big men down to size, insulting them endlessly and ruthlessly as he demanded perfection and speed on each cable-spinning job. At the slightest provocation he would fire anyone. He would fire his own brother. In fact, he had. On a bridge in Poughkeepsie in 1928, his brother, Ted, did not jump fast enough to one of Benny Olson's commands, and that was all for Ted.

  "Now look, you idiots," Olson then told the other men on the bridge, "things around here will be done my way, hear? Or else Til kick the rest of you the hell off, too, hear?"

  Very few men would ever talk back to Benny Olson in those days because, first, they respected him as a bridgeman, as a quick-handed artist who was faster than anybody at pulling wires from a moving wheel and at inspiring a spinning gang to emulate him, and also because Olson, when enraged, was wholly unpredictable and possibly dangerous.

  In Philadelphia one day, shortly after he had purchased a new car and was sitting in it at an intersection waiting for the red light to change, a jalopy filled with Negro teenagers came screeching up from behind and banged into the rear bumper of Olson's new car. Quickly, but without saying a word, Olson got out of his car and reached in the back seat for the axe he knew was there. Then he walked back to the boys' car and, still without saying a word, he lifted the axe into the air with both hands and then sent it crashing down upon the fender of the jalopy, chopping off a headlight. Two more fast swings and he had sliced off the other headlight and put a big incision in the middle of the hood. Finally he chopped off a chunk of the aerial with a wide sweep of his axe, and then he turned and walked back to his car and drove slowly away. The boys just sat in their jalopy. They were paralyzed with fear, stunned with disbelief.

  Olson was in Philadelphia then because the Walt Whitman Bridge was going up, and the punks hired to work on that bridge were incessantly tormented by Olson, especially the larger ones, and particularly one six-foot two-inch, 235-pound Italian apprentice named Dominick. Every time Benny Olson saw him, he would call him "a dumb bastard" or, at best, a "big, stupid ox."

  Just the mere sight of Olson walking down the catwalk would terrorize Dominick, for he was a very high-strung and emotional type, and Olson could get him so nervous and shaky that he could barely light a cigarette. One day, after Olson had hurled five minutes' worth of abuse at Dominick, the big Italian, turning red, lunged toward Olson and grabbed him by the scrawny neck. Then Dominick lifted Olson into the air, carried him toward the edge of the catwalk, and held him out over the river.

  "You leetle preek," Dominick screamed, "now I throw you off."

  Four other bridgemen rushed up from behind, held Dominick's arms, pulled him back and tried to calm him. Olson, after he'd been let loose, said nothing. He just rubbed his neck and smoothed out his shirt. A moment later he turned and walked idly up the catwalk, but after he had gotten about fifty feet away, Benny Olson suddenly turned and, with a wild flare of fury, yelled to Dominick, "You know, you really are a big, dumb stupid bastard." Then he turned again and continued calmly up the catwalk.

  Finally, a few punks on the Walt Whitman Bridge decided to get revenge on Benny Olson. One way to irritate him, they decided, was to stop the spinning wheels, which they could do merely by clicking one of the several turn-off switches installed along the catwalk— placed there in case an accident to one of the men or some flaw in the wiring demanded an instant halt.

  So this they did—and, at first, Olson was perplexed. He would be standing on one end of the bridge with everything going smoothly, then, suddenly, a wheel would stop at the other end.

  "Hey, what the hell's the matter with that wheel?" he'd yell, but nobody knew. So he would run toward it, running the full length of the catwalk, puffing and panting all the way. Just before he would reach the wheel, however, it would begin to move again—a punk at the other end of the bridge would have flipped the switch back on. This conspiracy went on for hours sometimes, and the game became known as "Keeping the Wheel from Benny." And at 3 A.M. a few punks in a saloon would telephone Benny Olson at his hotel and shout, "Who's got the wheel, Benny?"—and then hang up.

  Benny Olson responded without humor, and all day on the bridge he would chase the wheel like a crazy chimpanzee—until, suddenly, he came up with an idea that would stop the game. With help from an engineer, he created an electrical switchboard with red lights on top, each light connected with one of the turn-off switches strung along the bridge. So now if any punk turned off a switch he would give away his location. Olson also appointed a loyal bridge worker to do nothing but watch the switchboard, and this bridgeman was officially called the "tattletale." If the wheel should stop, all Benny Olson had to do was pick up the telephone and say, "Who's got the wheel, Tattletale?" The tattletale would give the precise switch that had been flipped off, and Olson, knowing who was working nearest that spot, could easily fix the blame. But this invention did more than just put an end to the game; it also created a new job in bridge building—the tattletale—and on every big bridge that has been built since the Walt Whitman Bridge, there has been a bridge worker assigned to do nothing but watch the switchboard and keep track of the location of the wheels during the cable-spinning phase of construction. There was a tattletale on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, too, but he did little work, for, without Benny Olson to irritate, the demonic spirit had died—there was just no point anymore to "Keeping the Wheel from Benny." And besides, the men involved in spinning the cables on the Verrazano were very serious, very competitive men with no time for games. All they wanted, in the spring of 1963, was to get the catwalks strung up between the towers and the anchorages, and then to get the spinning wheels rolling back and forth across the bridge as quickly and as often as possible. The number of trips that the wheels would make between the anchorages during the daily work-shift of each gang would be recor
ded in Hard Nose Murphy's office— and it would be a matter of pride for each gang to try to set a daily mark that other gangs could not equal.

  Before the spinning could begin, however, the men would have to build a platform on which to stand. This platform would be the two catwalks, each made of wire mesh, each twenty feet wide, each resembling a long thin road of spider web or a mile-long hammock. The catwalks would each be held up by twelve horizontal pieces of wire rope, each rope a little more than two inches thick, each more than a mile long. The difficult trick, of course, would be in getting the first of these ropes over the towers of the bridge—a feat that on smaller bridges was accomplished by shooting the rope across with a bow and arrow or, in the case of Charles Ellet's pedestrian bridge, by paying a boy five dollars to fly a rope across Niagara on the end of a kite.

  But with the Verrazano, the first rope would be dragged across the water by barge, then, as the Coast Guard temporarily stopped all ship movements, the two ends of the rope would be hoisted out of the water by the derricks on top of the two towers, more than four thousand feet apart. The other ropes would be hoisted up the same way. Then all would be fastened between the towers, and from the towers back to the anchorages on the extremities of the bridge, following the same "sag" lines that the cables would later follow. When this was done, the catwalk sections would be hauled up. Each catwalk section, as it was lifted, would be folded up like an accordion, but once it had arrived high up on the tower, the bridgemen standing on platforms clamped to the sides of the tower would hook the catwalk sections onto the horizontal ropes, and then shove or kick the catwalk sections forward down the sloping ropes. The catwalks would glide on under the impetus of their own weight and unfurl—as a rolled-up rug might unfurl if pushed down the steep aisle of a movie theatre.

  Once all the catwalk sections glided, bumper to bumper, in place, they would be linked end to end, and would be further stiffened by crossbeams. A handrail wire "banister" would also be strung across the catwalks, as would several wooden cross planks to give the men better footing in places where the catwalk was quite steep.