“I’m through,” the driver says. “I can never drive a cab again. I can’t even drive this one today.” He says he was born in Spain and his family moved to the Dominican Republic when he was six; he has lived in New York since his teens. That night, after months of waiting, he was to see La Cage aux folles. “How can I see something like that after this?”
This is how a life can end: The cops take statements. An ambulance arrives from St. Vincent’s and the bloody-faced man is placed on a stretcher and into the back; it moves off with siren screaming, slowing behind jammed traffic at 23rd Street. From the lofts of the furriers above the avenue, people gaze down at the scene. Beside the tractor-trailer, there is a two-foot strand of blood, bright red against the dirty tar, and some plastic tubes that had been slipped down the stricken man’s throat. His gray plaid hat has rolled under the truck and lies beside the curb. I see a policeman’s hand reach down, circle it with chalk, pick it up. A pause. Then he drops it back in place.
“I know this man,” a white-haired man whispers. “I saw him 20 minutes ago.” I ask him for his name and the name of the man who has been carried away. He is reluctant to give either, and drifts away. The police are also careful; they first want to notify next of kin. The cab driver (still waiting for formal questions) hears this: “Is he — is the man dead?” The cop shrugs sadly. The driver leans on his cab, his body wracked with dry heaves.
This is how a life can end: All the questions have been asked, the forms filled in, names given, witnesses questioned. About an hour has passed. Traffic now moves quickly down the avenue. There is tape where the taxi’s wheels had come to a halt, darkening blood and chalk marks and a hat where the old man had come to the end of his life. A woman moves between two parked cars, waits for a break in traffic, hurries across the street. She never sees the blood. A gust of wind lifts the dead man’s sporty little hat and rolls it back against the curb.
VILLAGE VOICE,
March 18, 1986
BRIDGE OF DREAMS
In all years and all seasons, the bridge was there. We could see it from the roof of the tenement where we lived, the stone towers rising below us from the foreshortened streets of downtown Brooklyn. We saw it in newspapers and at the movies and on the covers of books, part of the signature of the place where we lived. Sometimes, on summer afternoons during World War II, my mother would gather me and my brother Tom and my sister, Kathleen, and we’d set out on the most glorious of walks. We walked for miles, leaving behind the green of Prospect Park, passing factories and warehouses and strange neighborhoods, crossing a hundred streets and a dozen avenues, seeing the streets turn green again as we entered Brooklyn Heights, pushing on, beaded with sweat, legs rubbery, until, amazingly, looming abruptly in front of us, stone and steel and indifferent, was The Bridge.
It was the first man-made thing that I knew was beautiful. We could walk across it, gazing up at the great arc of the cables. We could hear the sustained eerie musical note they made when combed by the wind (augmented since by the hum of automobile tires), and we envied the gulls that played at the top of those arches. The arches were Gothic, and provided a sense of awe that was quite religious. And awe infused the view of the great harbor, a view my mother embellished by describing to us the ships that had brought her and so many other immigrants to America — the Irish and the Italians and the Jews, the Germans, the Poles, and the Swedes, all of them crowding the decks, straining to see their newfound land. What they saw first was the Statue of Liberty, and the skyline, and The Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge.
My mother would tell us these things and then lead us down to the Manhattan side and show us Park Row, where the newspapers were, and City Hall, where a wonderful man named Fiorello worked as mayor, and the Woolworth Building, gleaming in the sun. Near dusk we’d take the trolley car back across to Brooklyn. I remember on one of those trips wanting to jump out and climb The Bridge’s cables and wrap my arms around those stone towers; nothing that immense could be real. The impulse quickly vanished. I had already walked the promenade and touched the stone and run my hands along the steel; I was from Brooklyn, and to me The Bridge was not a ghost, a painting, a photograph, or a dream. It was a fact. In the years that followed, everything changed, including me, but The Bridge was always there.
It has been there now for a hundred summers. Fiorello is gone, and so are the newspapers of Park Row. The last trolley crossed The Bridge in 1950. The Bridge has been altered, cluttered with the ugly advancements of the twentieth century. But it is as beautiful to me today as it was when I was young and had more innocent eyes. I was a teenager before I realized that all those puny, misshapen other bridges across the river even had names.
There was a long time in my life when I didn’t see much of The Bridge, except from the roof or the back window. The reason was simple: Trolleys were replaced by automobiles, and nobody I knew in our neighborhood owned a car. But then when I was sixteen, I got a job in the Brooklyn Navy Yard as a sheet-metal worker, and at lunchtime we would wander out along the cobblestone streets beside the dry docks, and from there we could look up at The Bridge. “Now the cats that built that,” a black welder named Fred Thompson said to me one day, “they knew what they were doin’.”
They certainly did. As I grew older, I came increasingly to see The Bridge as a monument to craft. It was New York’s supreme example of the Well-Made Thing. All around us in the sixties, the standards of craft eroded. As aestheticians proclaimed the virtues of the spontaneous, or exalted the bold gesture, or condemned form as an artistic strait jacket, I would cross The Bridge and wonder what they could mean. More than twenty men were killed in the construction of this thing, and others were ruined for life by accidents and disease suffered in its service. To those men, carelessness meant death, not simply for themselves, but for the human beings who would use what they were making. So they had no choice: They had to make it to last. And in doing so, in caring about detail and function and strength, they saw craft triumph into art.
They needed all the craft they possessed, and some that they didn’t: Many of the techniques they used were made up along the way. The undertaking was more formidable than any job of engineering ever before attempted in North America. The span over the water is 1,595 feet 6 inches long, and it is 85 feet wide. Each of the four main cables is 3,578 feet 6 inches long and contains 5,434 wires. The cables are capable of supporting 24,621,780 pounds each, and in the years since construction they have carried trolley cars, subway trains, and hundreds of thousands of automobiles with no strain.
Such a structure was not made simply to be looked at; The Bridge was made to be used. Before it could be anything else, it had to fulfill its primary function: the easing of travel for thousands of people across a river. But inevitably that journey became for some people a heavier rite of passage. If you grew up in Brooklyn, The Bridge could be a symbol of escape; sooner or later, the time arrived when some people had to make the crossing in a decisive way. At the other end was the dream of art, or music, or the theater. Many of us were drawn to law schools or the Police Academy or the vast treasures of the university libraries; some simply fled to freedom from the smothering safety of a family. I remember going over The Bridge to Whitehall Street to be sworn into the navy, three of us squandering our last civilian dollars on a cab. I made the fatal mistake of looking back, and carried The Bridge with me all through boot camp. Others enlisted in the armies of business and camped for life in the skyscrapers to the left of The Bridge. A few fled wives or lovers, the church or the Mob.