55 years ago today: Verrazzano-Narrows bridge upper deck opens

The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, formerly spelled Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, suspension bridge spanning New York Harbor from Brooklyn to Staten Island, was built by Swiss engineer Othmar Ammann from 1959 to 1964. Its 4,260-foot main span was, until the completion of the Humber Bridge in 1981, the longest in the world. The double-decked six-lane-wide roadway, 228 feet above mean high water at midpoint, is supported by four cables hung from towers 693 feet high. The cables themselves weigh nearly 10,000 tons each and the roadway 60,000 tons. An expensive engineering project largely because of the problem of land acquisition, its total cost was $325 million. In 1960 the bridge was named in honour of the 16th-century explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, but an orthographic disagreement led to its being spelled with a single z. In 2018 Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed a bill that was passed in the state senate to rectify the misspelling. When the towers were fully erected, workers began the process of spinning the bridge's cables. The American Bridge Company was selected to construct the cables and deck. The cable-spinning process began in March 1963, and took six months, since 142,520 miles of bridge cables had to be strung 104,432 times around the bridge. Three men died during the construction of the bridge. The first fatality was 58-year-old Paul Bassett, who fell off the deck and struck a tower in August 1962. Irving Rubin, also 58 years old, died in July 1963, when he fell off of the bridge approach. The third worker who died was 19-year-old Gerard McKee, who fell into the water in October 1963, after slipping off the catwalk. After McKee's death, workers participated in a 5-day strike in December 1963. The strike resulted in temporary safety nets being installed underneath the deck. These nets had not been provided during the four years prior to the strike. Each of the two suspension towers, located offshore, contains around 1 million bolts and 3 million rivets. The towers contain a combined 1,129,000 long tons of metal, more than three times the amount of metal used in the Empire State Building. Because of the height of the towers and their distance from each other, the curvature of the Earth's surface had to be taken into account when designing the bridge. The towers are not parallel to each other, but are 1 5/8 inch farther apart at their tops than at their bases. When built, the bridge's suspension towers were the tallest structures in New York City outside of Manhattan.

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