A Bridge With A View

Photo by Paul Scharf, View from Highlands across Sandy Hook Bay

I do not know if when I look at the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, it is looking back at me. From a distance, its impressively high, square shaped arches are unreal to my eyes; its suspension cables are brush strokes of gray steel that oddly blend with the clear blue sky and New Jersey's boat filled waters. Like a siren, it calls for attention, and this attention, undeniably, is given.

Growing up in a small town by the Sandy Hook Bay, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge hung like a painting, an obscure backdrop to a suburban setting that feels well removed from the commodity of New York City. Without a real close-up of the bridge, I did not usually connect what the madness of the traffic flow must've looked like while gazing at the scene: the ugliness of the car jams, the merges, the occasional accidents and exhaust fumes. It stood with a pristine stillness, which throughout each season made it look like a room-piece existing for our aesthetic pleasure. At night, it made for an almost holy viewing experience, as it decorated the bay with lines of green and white lines, all dotted with red, which illuminated across the dark water.

This view seemed to define our area of the Shore. People drove to the tip of Sandy Hook to gaze out at the Olympian-like suspension bridge. On the clearest of summer days, the view did not end at the Brooklyn side of the bridge: its view stretched across from Coney Island to Rockaway Beach, with the highest of Manhattan buildings bulging from behind. The highlight of my daily bike ride was always riding downhill by a boatyard, where that bridge surely, was always, the first thing to catch my sight. Staring at it, I thought I understood why I wanted to live and go to school somewhere out in New York, or where ever that bridge had the potential to lead. Staring at it for some eighteen years had a deep, conscious effect. I did, indeed, think it was looking back at me.

The Verrazano is not only a bridge, but a made-up road, one suspended in the sky, deus ex machina, guiding travelers swiftly from Staten Island to Brooklyn. Robert Moses, its creator, had a way of making paths through government: twisting legislation and policy to bend to his will. In that same vein he used this made power to literally create roads that before did not exist, ones that were placed not on land but in air.

Paul Matarazzo remembers, as a child, hating Robert Moses for closing the amusement rides at a South Beach in Staten Island in order to make it more upscale, akin to Jones Beach. He also remembers growing up in Staten Island before the Verrazano Bridge, and he remembers how hard it was to take a ferry out to Brooklyn in order to get to Manhattan. The bridge, built in 1964, would transform what was once a forgotten, rural borough into a major thoroughfare for the tri-state area. According to Paul, a boom in development occurred for Staten Island, as once-Brooklyn residents poured over into the now very accessible island.

Paul was there for the ground-breaking, and recalls watching its development as he rode the ferry below, to Brooklyn. His first ride over the bridge came when he was around 14. “I remember the views I saw of Manhattan and the waterway were unbelievable, it sort of took your breath away,” he recalls. “I remember seeing the thickness of towers, and feeling lost by it. Just to go for a ride across the bridge was a real treat. Being able to be in Brooklyn in a few minutes was amazing.”

Back at Sandy Hook Bay, I realize the compelling beauty of this bridge is that from far away, it seems as a single scene, a lovely view; but I remind myself that it is more: it is a great intersection. It is a busy crossing which unleashed five boroughs upon one another for the first time. It changed Paul's Staten Island, as it changed the view across the way in New Jersey. Before it was built, the waterway gap it crossed over was simply called the “Narrows.”

But this bridge is even more than a road. It is a road that leads to people's jobs, to park sites, to museums, to beaches, to homes. The road leads home – it leads to New Jersey, to Staten Island, out to Brooklyn and inevitably connects to the many through ways that can somehow reach the far reaching crevices of Maine. It is a road that, though measuring across 4,260 feet, goes further than conceived.

Here is a perfect picture on flickr that I couldn't paste into the article - it is the exactly view of the bridge from the tip of Sandy Hook.

Photo Credit - Sandy Hook Bay Wikipedia Article