Abroad in New York
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

Every New Yorker keeps a mental list of the apartment buildings he would like to live in. One of mine is the Normandy. Not the one on Riverside Drive, though I like it fine. I mean the one on the northeast corner of Shore Road and 95th Street in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.
This Normandy is a good Art Moderne building from 1939, nicely situated across Shore Road from the wonderful waterfront ribbon park which Robert Moses endowed upon Bay Ridge in the 1930s. The apartment I’d like would have to be one of the ones in the curving corner facing south. Though I have never been in one of those apartments, it is clear that they have the world’s greatest views of Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which opened 40 years ago last week.
The residents of Bay Ridge enjoy the Robert Moses parks – not just the waterfront ribbon, but also Owl’s Head Park to the north and Dyker Beach Park to the east. Those residents, however, may be less sanguine about the bridge. This is not because they do not admire its graceful arc across the narrows, connecting Long Island to Staten Island. And it is not because they do not admire its stunning engineering – the way, for example, that the bridge designers had to adjust the span for the earth’s curvature. It is because, like so many of Moses’s bridge and road projects, the Verrazano tore its neighborhood asunder, displacing thousands of Bay Ridgers from their homes.
I am sensitive to that. So many years on, however, it is hard not to be bowled over by the bridge. Its central span of 4,260 feet made it the world’s longest suspension bridge when it opened in 1964. It lost that title, to the Humber Bridge in Yorkshire, England, in 1981. Today, the Verrazano ranks no better than eighth in the world, though it remains the longest in the United States, beating the Golden Gate by a few feet. In 1882, the Brooklyn Bridge stunned the world with its record-shattering central span of 1,595.5 feet. The Verrazano is nearly two-and-three-quarters times longer than the Brooklyn. (The George Washington, built in the 1930s, has a central span of 3,500 feet.)
A Swiss-born and -trained engineer named Othmar Ammann designed the Verrazano, as he had designed the George Washington, the Triborough, the Bronx-Whitestone, the Throgs Neck, and the Bayonne bridges. One may justly infer that Ammann was the 20th-century’s pre-eminent bridge designer. He lived in a penthouse in the Carlyle Hotel on Madison Avenue, where he kept a telescope that he could train on any of his creations.
In John Paul Jones Park, at Shore Road and Fourth Avenue, stands a fine memorial to John La Corte, a Bay Ridge man who spent his life trying to elevate the image of Italian-Americans. He campaigned to have the bridge named for the 16thcentury Florentine explorer. (Oddly, the explorer’s name lost a z in the process.) Verrazzano’s contemporary, Leonardo da Vinci, would have loved the bridge.