DB: Well, certainly the most famous of all the quotes of Montgomery Schuyler, our first real critic of structures and bridges, he was impressed immediately by this "aerial bow," as he called it, just lighting the sky going across the river in this, yes, effortless way. And so that was a, struck him and he was the most articulate spokesman for the day. It surely struck a lot of people that way, no question about it, right up to the marvelous poetry of Hart Crane in the '20s.

DB: The Hell Gate Bridge was certainly a milestone in bridge design in the United States. It was designed by the man who is probably the greatest bridge designer between Roebling and Ammann. The bridge is creature of its time, but it's also of its designer. It's impossible for me, anyway, to think about that bridge apart from both the time at which it was conceived in the early 20th century and the man who did it. So that in thinking about these kinds of works, we have these two coordinates that come together. The man, of course, is a product of his time in some sense, but still he's outside of it a little bit. So that Lindenthal's ideas arose out of a climate in late 19th and early 20th century when the railroad was building a large number of bridges following on a period in the middle of the century when there had been a great number of failures. And so the railroads became quite conservative, and understandably so. And the idea of a railroad bridge was to be something that was permanent, something that looked permanent, that looked solid and, nevertheless, would carry the loads with some degree of economy. So in that climate, Lindenthal himself, looking at what had been done throughout the country with bridge design, was repelled by many of the ugly truss-like forms that had appeared in which there was, as Ammann's teacher Wilhelm Ritter said, "no thoughts to the appearance." So it was in this light that Lindenthal approached this great project, this 1,000-foot, almost 1,000-foot span, arch bridge in 1907 or 1908 when he began seriously his design. What he did that was different from Roebling and would turn out to be different from what Ammann was to do, is Lindenthal made a separation in his mind between the technical design and the esthetic design.

DB: And this separation was symbolized by the hiring of Henry Hornbostel to make the esthetic design, whereas he, Lindenthal, would make the physical or the technical design. That's the principle defect of the Hell Gate Bridge, is the fact that there is this dichotomy between the utilitarian side of it and the esthetic side of it. And the dichotomy shows up most clearly in the form of the arch and in the great towers at either end of the arch, because the arch looks like it gets deeper, the two chords get further apart as you get close to the support, when, of course, all the loads are gradually being taken only by the lower chord. By the same token, the tower themselves, the towers themselves, which are then, in a way, esthetically necessary, in Hornbostel's view, because they must contain this widening arch, are, of course, carrying nothing. They are simply applying dead weight to the foundations. And so all of this could be scooped away and one would be left, for example, if one wants to build an arch such as the Hell Gate in which the two supports are actually hinges, in other words, actually reduce almost to vanishing points instead of being, giving the impression of being heavy, one would then lead, that would lead one to the great arches of Gustave Eiffel, in which this form is so elegantly expressed in the Massif Central of France or in the bridge over the, over the Douro River at Oporto.

DB: The Hell Gate Bridge is characteristic of a, a work in which there is a fundamental confusion of values. Compare it, for example, to Penn Station, built just before that and really part of the same project in a way. … [A] building like that the architectural vision is absolutely essential, the engineering is important, but the architectural vision is central, whereas a bridge it's the other way around. The engineering vision is central and architectural decoration is really quite irrelevant. So that's the basic problem I see with this work and which prevents it from being a great work of structural art. At the same time, it was built at just the time that the railroad was beginning to lose its dominant position as the transport--main transportation mode of the nation. And it is rather characteristic at times that people build such things when their golden era, so to speak, is over, or least is beginning to wane. So this is a kind of a monument to the end of the Railroad Age in a certain sense, and we'll see later on with bridges of Ammann how gradually Ammann moves away from that esthetic. Even though it still has a strong impression on him, made a strong impression on him, as it did on many people, but at the same time he feels the need, because of the new mode of transportation, the automobile, because of this real transformation that is beginning to take place in the country in the 1920s, that he must move away from that kind of a vision and to one that it reflects the lighter, more mobile, more decentralized image of the automobile.

DB: The bridge is a very important training ground for Ammann. He, first of all--and this is so crucial to understanding these things--he, first of all, takes with him the sense that a bridge has to be very, very carefully worked out. And he does that in the Hell Gate Bridge. His prizewinning article is a demonstration of engineering of some of the best engineering that's ever been done. So that is the ground of all engineering. Without that, no pretty pictures, no renderings mean anything. So he takes that, first of all, with him. The second thing he takes with him is the importance of how something looks. And surely Lindenthal influenced him there because Lindenthal was deeply concerned about that.

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