Books
An academic’s love affair with the George Washington Bridge
Michael Aaron Rockland has relished adventure all his life and woven some pretty wild personal experiences into past books. But his new book, The George Washington Bridge (Rutgers University Press, 2008), may contain the zaniest escapade of all: his unplanned, terror-filled, but ultimately triumphant ascension of the GWB one windy October morning in 2006.
Rockland, professor of American Studies in New Brunswick and the author of 11 books (two of which he coauthored), is again writing about a New Jersey landmark, as he did in Looking for America on the New Jersey Turnpike.
In his introduction, he explains why. Rockland loves all bridges, but has particular affection for this one. As a boy in the Bronx, he often hiked with friends across its swaying walkway to go camping in Fort Lee. As a long-term New Jersey resident with frequent jaunts into the city, he has continued the relationship.
To him, the immense steel structure is beautiful by day, magical at night.
“I would anticipate with pleasure the double-necklace of 148 emerald green mercury-vapor lights that decorates the two outside barrel cables,” he writes of the twice-monthly rides he took to visit his elderly mother during one period of his life.
Yet there is another reason Rockland wrote this book. When he sought to broaden his knowledge of the bridge, he discovered that no one had ever written a book about it. He was incensed. The bridge is the world’s busiest.
“Eight or nine books [were written] on the Brooklyn Bridge, and never one on the George,” he said recently. “Part of my feeling was one of redressing a wrong and a prejudice.”
Rockland devotes an entire chapter to probing why the Brooklyn Bridge enjoys iconic status, while the George Washington is relatively unknown. He suggests it’s the result of New Yorkers assigning New Jersey “secondary status.”
He also documents the life of Othmar Ammann, the little-known Swiss engineer who designed the bridge and supervised its construction. Ammann, a Boonton, New Jersey, resident, became chief bridge engineer for the Port of New York Authority in 1925; construction on the George Washington Bridge began in 1927 and was completed in 1931.
Yet his most interesting material may be the bridge itself. Rockland unmasks its secret spaces, taking readers down into the structures anchoring the 604-foot tall towers and through an abandoned tunnel on the New York side. He profiles some of the people who tend it (including Port Authority police officer John Teel, father of Mike Teel, starting quarterback for the Rutgers Scarlet Knights) and tells us that, among Port Authority workers, the GWB is a coveted assignment.
You learn that people who attempt suicide from the George are less likely to survive that those who attempt suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco; that peregrine falcons hang out there; that the cables are greased on a regular schedule; that the 14-lane suspension bridge is still a work in progress; that the center lanes of the lower level, originally planned for mass transit, remain unpaved; and that its creator never intended for the bridge to look the way it does.
Ammann, the designer, wanted the Art Deco towers to be clad in an envelope of concrete and faced with granite. But the Great Depression had arrived, and there were no funds for such flourishes.
As for the author’s terrifying climb, you learn that it resulted from a misunderstanding. His guides hadn't understood Rockland would have been perfectly happy to use the elevator. Instead, he was strapped into a safety harness and led up one of the bridge's huge cables to a perch 604 feet above the New York tower's foundation. Once he made it safely up there, he proudly arranged to be photographed.
Rockland is hoping his book will attract the general reader and ignite a passion similar to his own.
“When I finish a book, it’s like a love affair has ended,” said Rockland, who has since completed a novel and begun work on a memoir. “Hopefully, the love affair will begin now with my readers.”