The Joseph Biden Bridge

“An emblem of what this country represents” is how Vice President Biden described the Brooklyn Bridge when he spoke at the announcement of a plan to paint the rusting span. But given the astonishing $500 million price tag for the paint job and a few fixes to the ramps, it looks like the most storied of all American bridges is going to become, like the Tweed Courthouse, an emblem of something else entirely. In the case of the bridge it will be transformed into a symbol of how environmentalists, health activists, labor unions, and government ownership combine to drive costs to levels that lead ordinary taxpayers — who, after all, are going to be threatened with jail if they don’t pay for this paint job — to regard government with disgust.There is, at futureofcapitalism.com, a wonderful post on the escalating cost of this scandal. It was futureofcapitalism.com’s Ira Stoll who first perceived this scoop, back when he was managing editor of the Sun and liked to go for a stroll on the bridge. One day he sent a photographer out to record how the elegant iron work had rusted into an eyesore. The pictures, which also showed graffiti, caused something of a sensation when they were first published on our front page. Along with the pictures the Sun issued an editorial about the outrageous cost of the paint job, then estimated at $83 million. It wondered whether the person Mayor Bloomberg intended to hire to do the painting was Picasso. At the rate at which the price has inflated, hiring Picasso — or maybe someone from the Hudson River School — might be cheaper.The editorial, which was issued in 2006, elicited a letter to the editor from the city’s transportation commissioner at the time, Iris Weinshall. She’s a long-time public servant who explained that the reason for the delay in painting the bridge is that the work had to be dovetailed with painting and repairs on other bridges, lest the disruption of traffic become too great. That the painting of the bridge would start in 2009 was her promise, though maybe “promise” is too strong a word. She said that’s when it was scheduled to start. She did say “we could certainly start painting sooner,” save for the fact doing so would mean delaying work on another neglected span (our words, not hers), the Manhattan Bridge, an under-appreciated masterpiece that had been allowed to disintegrate to the point were reconstruction was “critical.”Commissioner Weinshall denied the Brooklyn bridge was suffering from “neglect,” and that led to our editorial, “The Weinshall-Bloomberg Bridge.” It suggested, among other things, that the display of brass plaques naming the officials on whose watch the bridge was built or rebuilt be expanded with a new plaque, “listing the debts that were piled onto a new generation of New Yorkers just to paint the bridge on the watch of Mayor Bloomberg and his transportation commissioner.” We suggested naming it The Bloomberg-Weinshall Bridge Painting Debt and noted that their images could be burnished into the bronze in bas-relief.A few months later, Ms. Weinshall left her post as transportation commissioner to work for the taxpayers elsewhere, at City University of New York. Less than a year later, after a bridge at Minneapolis collapsed into the Mississippi River, Ms. Weinshall’s husband, Senator Schumer, fetched up at a the Brooklyn Bridge itself to warn: “For far too long, highways and bridges in New York and across the country have been allowed to degrade to the point of dangerous disrepair.” He didn’t criticize his wife for having earlier denied it was being neglected. So we had one last editorial on the matter, suggesting renaming the span the “Schumer Weinshall Bridge.”Alas, the idea went nowhere, nor has the most logical proposal, that the city just sell the bridge so a private owner could fix it up at his own expense and charge whatever he wanted to let people cross it. If the tolls got to high, the city could let a competing firm put up a bridge to, say, the Battery. Meantime, along comes Mr. Biden. Now there’s a name that has a nice alliteration with these river-crossing structures: “The Joseph Biden Bridge.” If he’s going to shovel federal money provided by taxpayers into this scandal, let him put his name on it. Would he — announcer of the $500 million paint job — go for it? Well, it’s said that there’s a new sucker born every minute.

The Joseph Biden Bridge

The Joseph Biden Bridge

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