'Fearless' Men Built Verrazano, Writer Recalls On Bridge's 50th Anniversary
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- The construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge in the early 1960s was a breathtaking spectacle much like a ballet or circus act, describes a longtime journalist who covered the rising of the iconic New York span.
Gay Talese, who covered the building of the bridge for The New York Times and wrote a book about it, said he made it a point to tell the stories of the otherwise "virtually anonymous figures" who constructed the Verrazano, which opened 50 years ago Friday -- Nov. 21, 1964.
"The history of New York is made up of a lot of small stories," Talese told WCBS 880's Alex Silverman. "We have history-making people. They're well-known governors and mayors and businesspeople, Wall Street tycoons, etc., etc. But under ... their rule -- and sometimes despite their rule -- people of unknown quality but vast ambitions build in a small way what is great, what is large, what is lasting.
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"Strong-willed and fearless men on high altitudes sometimes straddling a narrow beam hundreds of feet above the sea -- it's a magnificent thing to see. ... It involves so many bits of movement in perilous places. So many men are injured in the process. You have to be strong of will and strong of heart to do this kind of work."
In his Times article about the official opening of the bridge, Talese noted that the iron workers who built the Verrazano were not invited.
"The great man of that period, (urban planner) Robert Moses ... was not exactly egalitarian," Talese said. "He wasn't a man who thought much about the working men, though he needed them to build everything he built.
"I really made it my little business to call attention to these men who were ignored, the uninvited."
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