Verrazano-Narrows Bridge ca. 1979
On November 21, 1964, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge opened, marking the end of eighty years of ambitious bridge building for New York City. The bridge, 60 feet longer than San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, crosses the Narrows to connect Staten Island and Brooklyn, thereby completing the physical consolidation of New York City. Funded by the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, the Verrazano represented the final display of designer Othmar Ammann's abilities to maximize the technical potential of enormous amounts of material, and to transform them into an elegant spectacle; The bridge was, as Robert Moses noted, a "triumph of simplicity and restraint over-exuberance." Precise engineering was required to allow for movement of the Verrazano's slender, flexible, two-dimensional steel towers and to adjust the height and the length of the span to the earth's subtle curvature. The latter resulted in the tops of the towers, which rise 60 stories off the ground, being 1.625 inches farther apart than the bottoms.
In contrast to the Brooklyn Bridge, New York's first major transit bridge, the Verrazano's vehicular capacity emphasizes the increased traffic produced by the City's modern metropolitan transportation system. types of traffic have also undergone an important change. Whereas the Brooklyn Bridge was built with a pedestrian walkway and tracks for mass transit lines, the Verrazano incorporates neither of these. The bridge, capable of supporting 250 million tons but devoid of sidewalks or rails, made clear the dominance of truck and automobile traffic in New York by the mid-20th century. Only New York City marathon runners cross the Verrazano on foot.
Repeated opposition shadowed the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows bridge. The U.S. War Department feared that if the bridge was bombed during an invasion, the Brooklyn Navy Yard would be sealed into the Bay, unable to send ships to sea. Engineers allayed such concerns by proving that the bridge could be destroyed only by a direct hit of an atomic bomb. The Bay Ridge community, located at the entrance and exit ramps on the Brooklyn side of the bridge, subsequently protested the displacement of 8,000 residents. Despite these issues, the bridge was successfully completed, and, as a gesture of compensation to the predominantly Italian residents of Bay Ridge, was named after the 16th-century explorer Giovanni da Verrazano. The opening of the bridge, however, was interrupted by another protest over its lack of sidewalks. Criticisms aside, construction of the Verrazano-narrows Bridge completed the loop of connecting roadways and bridges that connect New York's boroughs with each other and New Jersey. Heavily impacting the area of its approaches, the bridge was also the decisive factor in altering Staten Island from a community of farms and marshes into a precinct of light industry and suburban housing.
