Caught In The Act

This October 1952 photo by Angelo Rizzuto is titled “Aerial view of Manhattan” but it most obviously shows the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges. Like a lot of Rizzuto’s photos, it catches the East River waterfront and adjacent areas in the process of changing, even if it was not clear then how far the changes would go. It also appears to have been taken from a high floor in the Woolworth Buiding.

Some of the changes are obvious. The piers along the Manhattan side were almost deserted due to the fall-off in industry and the abandonment of coastal steamers for passenger transpiration. They’d mostly be gone in a few years. The housing project on the left, the Alfred E. Smith Houses, was still in construction in 1952, at a time when large-scale urban renewal was still in vogue for low-cost housing. The dome of the World Building, the steep-hip-roof tower of the Tribune Building, and the hip roof of the American Tract Society are just visible at the bottom of the picture. World and Tribune would be demolished not that long after this photo, along with a lot of the low-rise buildings behind them. The low-rise neighborhood was largely replaced with high-rise office buildings and apartment houses; the two big newspaper buildings were not directly replaced, for reasons to do with what you can see on the bridge.

If you look closely at the near end of the bridge, you can see construction and, in fact, that the westbound lanes (the north, farther side of the bridge) are closed to traffic because of the work. This was the first major overhaul of the bridge after its 1883 opening, and it was a big one. The streetcar tracks and elevated tracks were removed, converting the roadbed to three car lanes in each direction (the walkway remained at the center, elevated above the traffic), and the two outer stiffening trusses were raised in height so that they matched the two inner trusses. That redesign was performed by David Steinman, so the bridge has the distinction of having been designed by one of the great nineteenth-century bridge builders and redesigned by one of the twentieth-century’s.

Part of the bridge modernization was the addition of highway-style ramps to connect the roadway to the FDR Drive, the elevated highway on along the river. That required, in the mid-1950s, the demolition of the Tribune and World buildings as well as about twenty others abutting the bridge. Regardless of whether you believe the ramps were needed – and I do not – they leave the bridge isolated from its surroundings in a way that it had not been before. This view of the ramps from 1969’s “A Boy Named Charlie Brown” is not accurate in detail, but it captures the feeling of those ramps pretty well: