Piecework Page 6

  “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.

  Few of us knew the history of the building of The Bridge, that saga that began with John Roebling’s letter to the New York Tribune in 1857 (suggesting “a wire suspension bridge crossing the East River by one single span at such an elevation as will not impede the navigation”) and ended with fireworks, giddy editorials, and an opening-day parade of politicians, bankers, civic leaders, and thieves, led by President Chester Alan Arthur.

  No moviemaker, novelist, or comic-book artist could have invented John and Washington Roebling, father and son, the dreamer and the engineer. The father came from Germany, where he had been a friend of Hegel’s, and attempted various Utopian schemes before becoming a manufacturer of steel wire and the man who dreamed the dream of The Bridge. He was dead by 1869, felled by tetanus after his foot was crushed by a ferry while he surveyed the site of the towers. The son took over, and, despite a crippling bout with caisson disease, Washington Roebling soldiered on, commanding his brilliant engineering staff and an army of more than a thousand workers from his house at no Columbia Heights, checking the progress of the construction with a telescope.

  The story was rife with treachery and cynicism, peopled by rogues like William Marcy Tweed, the blue-eyed, 300-pound “Boss,” sitting in the corrupt splendor of Tammany Hall, holding up construction until someone arrived from Brooklyn with $60,000 in a carpetbag, to be spread among the members of the Board of Aldermen. More typical was Abram Hewitt, a dappe
r little congressman whose act was so slick it conned even Henry Adams. Acting as a spokesman for civic purity, he manipulated a ruling that forbade the Roebling-family firm to manufacture wire for use in the four main cables of The Bridge. Enter a bigamist and thief named J. Lloyd Haig, who got a large part of the wire business, secretly kicking back money to Hewitt. Eventually Haig was caught providing defective wire for The Bridge.

  Above all there were the workingmen and their supervisors, of whom E. F. Farrington, the master mechanic, was the most extraordinary. The workers labored in the horrors of the caissons, far beneath the river, chopping away at mud and rock to provide a solid base for each of the towers; former seamen climbed high among the cables, wrapping them by hand, stringing them with great skill. They were paid $2.25 a day, raised, after a four-day strike, to $2.75. Farrington went everywhere they went, and in 1876, when the first steel rope described its lovely arc from one tower to the other, he became the first man to make the crossing. He was almost 60, and showed up for the momentous day in a linen suit and a straw hat, and when he went out over the river on a boatswain’s chair, all the tugboats in the harbor began to blow their foghorns, and a crowd of 10,000 spectators cheered in amazement, and Farrington took off his hat and waved. By the time he descended into Brooklyn at the end of his historic trip, church bells were ringing and factory whistles screaming in what the Times the next day called “a perfect pandemonium.” That was some America. Those were some men.

  Growing up with The Bridge, we never knew this history. David McCullough’s splendid narrative The Great Bridge wasn’t published until 1972. But we knew how important the story had been, because there were still some old-timers around who talked about the “1898 Mistake,” the decision to join Brooklyn to Manhattan as part of Greater New York. That decision had its origins in politics, of course; the old-timers blamed the upstate Republicans, who hoped that Republican Brooklyn joined to Democratic Manhattan would lead to the permanent submersion of Tammany. But Brooklyn, which was an independent city, with its own mayor and government, was so infuriated at the upstate Republicans that it turned almost immediately Democratic and has stayed that way ever since. There was a quality of the fable to all of this, of course, a tale of a lost Arcadia in Brooklyn. But clearly the decision to join the five boroughs into one city was sealed from the day of the opening of The Bridge.

  Since we had no true history of The Bridge (in those days in Brooklyn we were taught more about the Tigris and the Euphrates than we were about the city in which we lived), we were forced to see its utility and art. The use of the structure was obvious; it allowed us to cross the city’s most turbulent river, often full of whirlpools and double currents.

  But it was also beautiful. That was the thing. And it was beautiful without history, the way a master’s painting of some forgotten duke or king is beautiful quite apart from the facts of the subject’s fame. It seemed baffling and strange that each succeeding New York bridge was uglier or less human than the first. As a young reporter, running around the city to fires and murders, I crossed all of the bridges, large and small; with the possible exception of the George Washington, they were uniformly ugly and graceless, bridges made not for people but for their cars. Only The Bridge seemed made by humans for humans. It was no accident that one day in the late fifties someone began to notice a lone black man out on The Bridge, playing the most aching blues on a saxophone. The man had been a star and then had gone away to find some new thing to make music about. His name was Sonny Rollins. Today I can’t ever cross The Bridge without thinking about him, all alone, accompanied only by the sound of the wind striking the great cabled harp, playing for the gulls and himself. Washington Roebling, who was also an accomplished musician, would have loved that.

  Of course, it is the nature of all bridges that they travel in two directions. I know dozens of people who traveled west on The Bridge, wandered the world, and then made the long, wide circle home to Brooklyn. I don’t know anybody who ever did that from the Bronx. From the Manhattan shore, The Bridge still seems to whisper: “Come, travel across me. It’s only 1,562 feet across the river, and over here, and beyond, lies Oz, or Camelot, or Yoknapatawpha County.” And from the Brooklyn side it speaks in plain, bourgeois tones, with a plain, simple message: “Come home.”

  When I went home to live in Brooklyn, many things had changed, but The Bridge remained. Every day for years, I would drive across it in the morning and feel that combination of intensity and serenity that Manhattan always evoked. It is in the nature of journalism that no day is like any other; your life’s work is shaped by events. One result is that you come to cherish those things that do not change. They provide stability of place in a world that insists upon altering its look, its cast, and its rules. The Bridge never changed.

  What has changed is the way we see The Bridge. For many, it remains simply a grand fact. But for Hart Crane, John Marin, Joseph Stella, Georgia O’Keeffe, Walker Evans, and hundreds of other writers, painters, and photographers, The Bridge is a symbol, at once permanent and evolving, its image changing with the times. Today it reminds us that there were once men in this country, many of them quite young, who believed that anything was possible. They believed that if you could dream a suspension bridge over the East River, you could build one. And they did. They did it with an eye for beauty, and a love of craft, and the thing they made has endured. In New York, fads and fashions come and go. Architects inflict novelties upon us that rise, are written about and soon torn down. Politicians make careers, lead millions, and end up as statues in a park. Scoundrels dominate the newspapers, actresses and dancers take their turns in the spotlight, writers and singers bow to acclaim. And soon all of them are gone. A few things remain. And one of them is The Bridge. It stands there, every day of our lives, and it is oddly comforting to think that it will be there long after most of us are gone.

  NEW YORK,

  May 30, 1983

  SPALDEEN SUMMERS

  Summer, when I was a boy in Brooklyn, was a string of intimacies, a sum of small knowings, and almost none of them cost money. Nobody ever figured out a way to charge us for morning, and morning then was the beginning of everything. I was an altar boy in the years after the war, up in the morning before most other people for the long walk to the church on the hill. And I would watch the sun rise in Prospect Park — at first a rumor, then a heightened light, something unseen and immense melting the hard early darkness; then suddenly there was a molten ball, screened by the trees, about to climb to a scalding noon. The sun would dry the dew on the grass of the park, soften the tar, bake the rooftops, brown us on the beaches, make us sweat, force us out of the tight, small flats of the tenements.

  And if dawn was a tremendous overture, endlessly repeated, the days were always improvisations. How did we decide what to do with our time? We didn’t; the day decided. The day had its own rhythms. I don’t remember ever drawing up plans, or waiting for some agent of the state to arrive and direct us. Usually, the day would tell us to meet on the corner, with a pink spaldeen and a stickball bat. All through the war, there had been no spaldeens, and the few survivors had been treasured or replaced with those gray furry tennis balls we all despised, because we had never seen tennis played, had no idea what it was about, worshiped no tennis players. When spaldeens returned, stickball entered a golden age. Two blocks away, on 14th Street beside the Minerva Theater, the Tigers played gigantic money games, with pots as large as $300 and audiences jamming the sidewalks. Our games were smaller. We were still amateurs. Literally lovers. Lovers of that simple game with its swift variations on baseball: one strike and you were out, no bases on balls, six men on a team, sewer tops for bases, scoreboards chalked on tar. We made bats from broom handles, and there was an elaborate ritual of transforming broom to bat: clawing away the wire that held the straw by jamming the broom on a picket fence; then burning away the end of the straw; then sanding off splinters and taping the handle. Those brooms made beautiful bats, thin at the handle, thick
er at the end. Today, commercially made stickball bats are sold in stores, products of Super Glut; they are terrible bats, as straight and untapered as poles. Playing with them is like playing with a mop handle.

  Stickball wasn’t always a team game. We played variations called catchaflyerup (or, more literally, catch a fly, you’re up), in which a batter kept hitting until someone caught a batted ball on the fly; roly-poly, where you rolled the spaldeen, after it was hit, toward the bat, which lay flat across home plate (if the ball hit the bat, bounced, and the batter missed it, the player who rolled it became the new hitter); and, most simply, tenhitsapiece, in which each batter was allowed to hit ten times. The simpler variations were played early in the morning, before everybody showed up on the court. When there were enough players, we started the full games, with their elaborate, specific ground rules: Off the factory wall was a home run, off the diner was a hindoo (a do-over). Around the city there were dozens of other variations.

  We didn’t play much baseball because the equipment cost too much money, but we lived and breathed the game. Most of us were Dodger fans, from territorial loyalty, but also because it was one of the greatest of all baseball teams. In all of that neighborhood, I knew one Giant fan and one guy who unaccountably rooted for the Cincinnati Reds. Nobody rooted for the Yankees.

  That was before television’s triumph, before so many children were turned into passive slugs, before the relentless tides of Super Glut had jammed or pacified so many imaginations. We didn’t have those giant $350 radios you see everywhere now (the radio in our house was shaped like a cathedral, and you had to hold the aerial in the back to hear clearly). But somehow we always knew The Score. Red Barber narrated the Dodger games on WHN, and we would shout into the bars — into Rattigan’s, Fitzgerald’s, Quigley’s, Unbeatable Joe’s — “Who’s winnin’ and who’s pitchin’ and who got the hits?” We knew; we always knew. The Score was like some insistent melody being played in another room, parallel to our own lives and our own scores.