Sometime in the mid-1960s, my mother and I drove over the then-new Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which opened on November 21, 1964.

As we crossed over “the Narrows,” which separate Brooklyn from Staten Island, I vaguely recall my mother telling me that the crossing was the world’s longest suspension bridge, which impressed me. And as we descended into Bay Ridge, on the Brooklyn side of the bridge, I think she told me that many houses were demolished and people were displaced to build the approaches to the bridge, which, I seem to recall, made me feel uneasy.

Reflecting on that makes me wonder if this was the start of my fascination with the politics of highways, transit systems, and airports. It also makes me recall my mother’s interest in transportation systems, particularly the highway networks that transformed the New York region in the middle of the 20th century. She had an unbelievable memory for places and routes, so good that my daughters referred to it as “GrannieQuest.”

So it’s no surprise that she was interested in the then-new Verrazano-Narrows bridge, which, she probably hoped, would make it easier to go to visit her sister, who lived in Plainview, a “hamlet” in central Long Island. (Random aside: I’ve never understood why and how New York state distinguishes between hamlets, villages, and towns.)

The bridge was a big deal, perhaps even bigger than she realized when we drove across it (probably in 1965). It was not only the longest bridge in the world, it also was the last bridge designed by Othmar Ammann, the great bridge builder who had designed the George Washington Bridge in the 1920s. And, it turned out to be the last major bridge built in the New York metro area for almost five decades (until the new Cuomo Bridge, which replaced the Tappan Zee Bridge, opened in 2017).

Bridging the Narrows – a tidal straight that connects the Upper New York Bay and Lower New York Bay and forms the principal channel by which the Hudson River empties into the Atlantic Ocean – was an idea that had been discussed for several decades. But it didn’t become an official plan until the late 1950s, when the city approved a plan that required taking about 800 homes and displacing about 7,500 residents of Brooklyn’s Bay Ridge neighborhood.

In a New York Times article about how residents of that neighborhood felt about the vote, Gay Talese, wrote “Many merchants, housewives, and even a mortician were seething in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn…From the barber shops to the Bohack’s, conversation bristled with contempt. A man in a cigar store asked, “that bridge-who needs it?” A dentist wondered about new patients. A used-car dealer worried about a new lot. Mrs. Olga Kaidy, a housewife of the Fort Hamilton Parkway, asked, “Where are we going to live.”

The article was the first of many that Talese – who went on to write several notable non-fiction books—wrote about the project (which was also the subject of his second book). Many of those pieces open in a wonderful way. A January 1964 article, headlined “Bridge Delights ‘Seaside Supers'”, for example, opens: “The iron workers moved like high-wire walkers between the towers, singing and whistling 400 feet in the sky. Below, 200 seaside superintendents watched from the Brooklyn shoreline, and one of them said, “What a day-what a beautiful day for bridge-building.”

Writing in June 1964 piece on how the project was being seen in Bay Ridge, Talese started: “The robin-red towers of the bridge shoot 690 feet up from the Narrows and dominate the skyline along the western shore of Brooklyn, making everything below-the churches, the homes, the people, seem drab and insignificant.” After noting that “already the bridge’s graceful design, its rainbow reach…have awed engineers and esthetes,” he went on point out, “Yet there are people who hate the bridge. To them it’s not poetry, merely steel-implacable and unnecessary.”

In an essay that accompanied photographs of the men who built the bridge that appeared on November 15, less than a week before the bridge opened, Talese started by observing: “They spend their lives climbing cables, rattling rivets, stringing up steel-and pushing their luck. They seem to pursue danger and they get bored when the steel is secure, so bored that they quit the job and wander off to another city, another bridge, another challenge in the sky. Now the bridge-builders have abandoned the Verrazano-Narrows for newer spans in Delaware, or Portugal, or Venezuela; but they have left behind, between Brooklyn and Staten Island and over the Narrows, a marvelous monument to their madness.”

And in his piece on the dedication ceremony itself, opens: “The sun shone, the sky was cloudless; bands played, cannons echoed up and down the harbor, flags waved, and thousands of motorists yesterday became part of the first-perhaps only-blissful traffic jam on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.”

Interviewed in 2014, when the bridge turned 50, Talese explained that “my instinct was to stay away from the big story.” Instead, he said, his approach was to “do the small story,” adding, “it’s not small if you do it well.”

His observations, and the bridge he wrote about, have both stood the test of time. (The bridge’s name, however, was modified in 2018 because it turns out that the preferred spelling of the Italian explorer it honors has two ‘n’s, as in Verrazanno.)

Whether it had one or two ‘n’s (and if memory serves), over the years, my mother generally didn’t take the bridge when she went from her home in Summit, NJ to visit her sister because she thought it made the trip longer, not shorter. Google Maps confirms the GrannieQuest analysis: using the bridge would (on this Saturday night) add 11 minutes to Google’s recommended route (via the George Washington Bridge) and 8 minutes to my mother’s preferred route (via the Holland Tunnel and then across lower Manhattan to the Manhattan Bridge).

Sometimes, it turns out, your mother really does know best.

Stay safe, be well, fight for justice, and work for peace.