GT: I arrived in New York as a full time resident in the middle 1950s. And the city's bridges did not look then as they do now in all instances. I particularly remember the Queensboro Bridge having interesting towers, that are now not there because of one of them being a bit shaky and they had to remove all of them. But there were these wonderful spikes in the sky above the Queensboro Bridge.

And the George Washington Bridge, in those days when I arrived, had a very thin, thin span. It was only a single span, not the double span we see today. And it was so much more like a rainbow creation in those days as it went through the Palisades to the Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan. And I think, in those days, that the bridge was, the George Washington Bridge was more beautiful, more spectacular sight than it is now. … I think [Ammann] probably liked the single span more than this because this double span was clearly the result of the financial need for a expanding population that used Manhattan as its work site more than had been the case when, when Ammann first saw it completed in the 1930s. But bridges must make concessions to changing life as so many other forms of expression and I guess what you have now is still a beautiful bridge but not the one I remember when I first moved to New York in the mid '50s.

GT: We never know how the future's going to affect the usefulness of [a] project. And so Moses, in saying that this bridge would solve this traffic problem and another bridge would mean we don't have as much traffic or another tunnel or another road, is just merely a reflection of his lack of skill in prognosticating and it's really not a lack of skill but really it is impossible to prognosticate how the future is going to change life. So the bridge that was in the mind of Ammann when he built and designed the George Washington is not the bridge that, thirty years later, would be with its second deck. It was a different looking bridge. And the new bridge that we now have in George Washington with its twin roadways does not mean that we do not have traffic jams because with this growing population and the growing economy, there are more cars and more identity with being a driver rather than being a user of public transportation.

But the usefulness of a Robert Moses, in many forms, is really an essential component to the creative personage such as Mr. Ammann. One cannot exist without the other. They are director, producers, I might have said before. They are part of the same artistic equation, although one has to build the stage and the other has to put something on it that is worthy of the stage. So the Ammann-Moses combination-and there are many other parallels to those two gentlemen in other forms of necessary and creative endeavor-they are essential partners.

GT: In 1959, and I'd lived in New York for about four years at the time, I was aware as a reporter of the New York Times … that there was this building in the middle of the river between Staten Island and Brooklyn, what would be called the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. And I'm a very curious person. I come from a small town. I come from an island actually in the Southern part of New Jersey, surrounded by bridges. So I'd always had a curiosity about bridges but, of course, never had an idea that bridges could be so magnificent as what was being planned at that time and it would be called the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. So, out of curiosity, not much else, I went out and watched as the bridge was slowly coming up out of the ocean, out of the river. And in subsequent months and then later years, I continued to go to that place and watch its further development. And in its stages when men in great numbers would be swinging from the cable and swinging from the catwalks that, that went the full extension from one tower to the other … it looked like spiders working up on these cables. These men were so hard to see; their bare silhouettes against the sky.

And I actually saw them too as an ongoing force almost like there was something military about it because they were very regimented and they were very structured. And when I wrote one of these chapters of the book, I try to make that point. It's from a book called, Bridge that I published a year after the bridge was opened in 1965. And I write, "Building a bridge is like combat. The language is of the barracks and the men are organized along the lines of a non-commissioned officer's caste. At the very bottom, comparable to an army recruit, are the apprentices, called punks. They climb catwalks with buckets of bolts. They climb catwalks with buckets of bolts learned through observation and turns on the tools. And occasionally are sent down for coffee and water, and seldom hear thanks. Within two or three years, most punks have become full-fledged bridge men. And they're qualified to heat and catch and drive rivets and to raise and weld and connect steel but it is the last job, connecting the steel that most captures their fancy. The steel connectors stand highest in the sky, their sweat taking minutes to hit the ground. And when the derricks hoist up new steel, the connectors reach out and grab it with their hands, swing it into position, bang it with bolts and mallets and link it temporarily to the steel already in place and leave the rest for the riveting gangs."

GT: We are sometimes inconvenienced by a bridge undergoing repair and I think sometimes it might be the opinion of many of us that the bridge should've been maintained more properly. And if it had been, we would've found less need for inconvenience such as traffic jams because of sections of a bridge unavailable to us. I don't think this is necessarily true. I think a bridge is like a living thing and at times it just needs repair. It's the stress-the function on a bridge is so enormous and ongoing through the seasons and the day and the night, that there's simply times when it has to be ministered to as almost if it's a form undergoing medical treatment.

Also there are times when a bridge is considered obsolete. It should be moved to a different place. It no longer caters to the population that necessitated it in the beginning. But that's true of all great buildings. I mean, we have had in the city of skyscrapers, which is New York, some of the great edifices that were the wonderment of the 1890s no longer with us, or the early 1900s. And there's, you know, there's always some part of a monument to a certain generation removed by a subsequent generation because it outlived its usefulness or so it is believed. And this is the ongoing process of evolution, the ongoing process of birth and death. And you find it in bridges sometimes and in buildings, of course, all the time.

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