I recently took care of the book The cathedrals of heaven, by Michel Moutot, a story about intrahistories, those of the lives of those in charge of turning New York into the first great city of skyscrapers. Straddling reality and a certain mythological funk, the book teaches us how the great mananza has come to be the symbol that it is.
Now we have to address the history of the Verrazano-Narrowks Bridge, which is the same, the famous link between Brookyl and Staten Island. It may not be as famous as the Brooklyn Bridge with Manhattan itself, but its project, development, completion and the passage of time and lives around it, well deserved this story halfway between the story and the reality of its materialization.
If even today, with its more than 4.000 hanging meters, in constant defiance of gravity, it continues to maintain its architectural value as one of the longest among all the pendants in the world, we can imagine what it meant back in 1964, when it became completed.
Gay Talese exerts in this book as a chronicler, with a mythological touch, with almost legendary contributions from various testimonies. The little things and the big problems that arose during the realization of this bridge now surface with that aftertaste of the closest, almost tangible history, that of the men and women who participated in that ancestral idea that is to unite two slopes to unify continents, countries. , cities, neighborhoods and people ...
El Verrazano-Narrowks bridge It stands out now as a great engineering work but since its planning it encountered a thousand and one adversities, from what involved the mobilization of people who occupied the areas where it was necessary to implant, to the mishaps, the tasks carried out in the past by risky men where now everything is mechanized.
Without a doubt, it was worth telling without leaving anything behind, with that brightness of the memories that glorify, between melancholy and satisfaction, everything that the human being is capable of carrying out ...
You can buy the book the bridge, from Gay Talese, here: