I grew up on Staten Island, only ferries to New York, before the Verrazzano. My grandfather was the Harbor Master during WW II so I got to know a lot of folks at the time. One of my lifeguard buddies was dating Justine Moran of the tugboat family so I got to see a lot of tugs. My uncle was a NY Fire Department Deputy Chief and in charge os such things as safety of the Verrazzano bridge, for fire and explosion reasons. As a lifeguard I watched summer by summer as the bridge was built, across the Narrows into the busiest shipping harbor in the US.
It was during the peak of the cold war and fear that a bomb would shut the harbor if it his the bridge. So the design was to insure that if it were hit it would not collapse and block the Narrows, but under great tension would swing back on State Island and Brooklyn. Needless to say a few folks in the way would be eliminated. Cold War thinking.
One need look at the two bridges, the Verrazzano and the one in Baltimore. One bomb proof, albeit possibly slaughtering a few folks, and the second looking like a down scale Lionel train bridge. OK, I have to reveal I took some Civil Engineering courses and thus know a bit about bridges. The Baltimore one was a disaster from step one.
Hopefully its replacement is more like the one in NYC, with perhaps a cold war view of life.
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