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LIBRARY PICK
The Bridge
by Gay Talese

176 pgs. Walker and Company, 2003

21 Apr 2003

In the summer of 2002, a steelworker named Mark Montour stood on the beam of a Jersey City skyscraper seven hundred feet in the air, talking on his cell phone with author Gay Talese. As Talese writes in the afterword to The Bridge, Montour told him he was "overlooking Ground Zero on the opposite side of the harbor and with a view of a dozen buildings that his late father helped to build, including the Met Life Building, when it was called the Pan Am, and, of course, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which, even on cloudy days, he can clearly see."

Talese writes "of course, the Verrazano-Narrows," because the last time he talked to Mark Montour, four decades ago, he was just a toddler, the son of Danny Montour, a Mohawk Indian steelworker featured in The Bridge, Talese's 1964 book about the construction of the bridge that stretches over two miles from Brooklyn to Staten Island.

Widely praised after its release, The Bridge fell out of print for more than 20 years. This year, it was republished as a paperback, with a new afterword by Talese. For the lengthy afterword, Talese attempted to contact and revisit many of the people he met in the sixties and featured in The Bridge, including Danny Montour, whom Talese found had died in 1972, killed in a work accident.

Talese originally decided to write about the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge because he wanted to tell the stories of people like Danny Montour, the individuals whose "fingerprints are on the bolts and beams" of New York City. Then a New York Times reporter, Talese followed the bridge's progress closely, donning a hard hat and visiting workers along the catwalks of the bridge's iron frames.

As the New York Times Book Review wrote after the book was originally published, Talese saw the bridge as "a human rather than a mechanical achievement, imparting drama and romance to this bridge building story." As part of the bridge's story, Talese introduces the reader to people like superintendent Drag-Up Drilling and his son John, who also became a bridge worker, and Gerard McKee, who worked on the Verrazano-Narrows with his two brothers before he fell to his death in the autumn of 1963.

Talese revisited McKee's family in the summer of 2002, and found both brothers still working steel, but contemplating retirement. He also looked up McKee's co-worker Edward Iannielli, who had held onto McKee for as long as he could the day of the accident. Before retiring in 1991, Iannielli returned to work on the Verazzano-Narrows Bridge, removing rust from the towers and cables, and writing the name of his late wife, Catherine, on one of the high beams.

Like many of the workers Talese got to know while writing The Bridge, Iannielli worked on the construction of the World Trade Center. In interviews after the September 11 attacks, Iannelli told Talese about the misgivings he had when working on the Twin Towers' "flimsy" and hurried construction.

Besides the workers, The Bridge also tells the story of the bridge's designer O.H. Ammann, the figure that championed the bridge into existence, Robert Moses, and the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn residents who were displaced to make way for the Verrazano-Narrows. Eight hundred buildings were destroyed to clear space for the bridge's approach ways, and seven thousand people had to move. It took eighteen months for everyone to leave his or her homes.

In The Bridge, Talese describes one of the last Bay Ridge residents to pack up and move, a 42-year-old divorcee named Florence Campbell. She "left after the lovers, after the dentist, and after the former Ziegfield Follies girl, Bessie Gros Dempsey, who had to pack up her 350 plumed hats and old scrapbooks," he writes. "She left after the crazy little man who had been discovered alone in an empty apartment house because, somehow, he had never heard the bulldozers beneath him and had no idea that a bridge was being built." Campbell stayed while her entire neighborhood emptied out, but after a murder in her largely abandoned building, she took the first apartment she could find nearby.

In writing the afterword, Talese also paid a visit to Bay Ridge, and found that many of the residents who once protested Moses' plan for the bridge now felt that "their worst fears had failed to transpire, that the new location into which they had been forced to move their businesses or domiciles turned out not to be as disruptive or depressing as they had imagined."

He wasn't able to find Florence Campbell, but did talk to the dentist. After being uprooted in the 1960s, Dr. Henry Amen found a new office close enough to Bay Ridge to keep his clients, and was still working, at the age of 76.

Coney Island
 


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