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.
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