in admiration of the span
When I was at my youngest, the bathroom window of my family apartment looked out upon a bridge that carried trains. During the day, passenger rail thundered by, echoing off the tiles, through the hallway and into the living room where whomever fell under its grace would turn their head to make sense of the sound, like an animal.
The bridge was opened on March 5th 1917. On March 5th, 1917, the city passes a bill requiring all dogs to be registered to their owners. In signing this, City Hall nullifies a previous law requiring punishment upon any canine found chasing sheep—as of now, the owner shall be punished in their place.
The rumbling of the bridge is the soundtrack to my upbringing. It was constant, though often when the drone would clarify it revealed itself as a low-flying plane or a helicopter. On three occasions, it was punctuated by an explosion — two of those came from the power plant a few blocks away, while the other was a manhole cover ripping through a double-parked car.
March 5th, 1917: 13-year-old Richard Hippe confesses to the authorities that indeed it was he who tried to burn down Public School 10 four times over the past three weeks. He worked out the plan while lying in bed, he says, hoping that it would get him out of having to do schoolwork.
During the day, a passenger train passes over the Hellgate Bridge, on average, once every twelve minutes. At night, the number drops to around one per hour, as passengers are exchanged for freight. This happens for the first time between one and two a.m. They do not have a tilting mechanism. They travel slowly, and as they come around the bend they scream.
Around noon on March 5th, 1917, a man named Gustav looks on with a smile as the bridge he designed opens for its first traverse. Three years prior, his employer recommended he fill the 15-foot gap between the arch and the terrestrial masonry towers, as they feared people would question its integrity. He decided to attach them with two steel waves at each end, forming an unbroken steel connection between Long Island on the East, and Ward’s Island on the West.
Topping each tower is an open-air room with windows to the outside world. They were designed to emulate the triumphal towers of Rome, complete with thin slits below each window where an archer could feel at home. The headlight of the passing train is faster than the engine—when it arrives, it illuminates the four great arches, signaling that it’s time to wake up. As the engine enters, the towers glow like a furnace, and then go dark.
Gustav was a successful bridgeman. According to friends, he was greatly affected by his pursuit of perfection and his love of art. When the Pennsylvania Railroad Company asked him if he could remove the planned embellishments from his great Roman towers, he was disappointed. But he gave in when they argued that patients at the asylum on Ward’s Island might try to climb them seeking an escape.
The towers are square at the base, rising as an obelisk that reaches into space. Inside, a circular staircase climbs along the walls, attached every few steps by a pair of bolts, screwed into holes that have long since been worn down. When the freight train pulls its horn to announce its arrival, you can hear the bolts rattle in their sockets. It’s a poor design, but necessary since there was a shortage of iron when the interior was built out.
The Hellgate Bridge was named for the strait over which it passes, given to it by a Dutch explorer who in turn got it from the Hellespont, in Greece. On the East bank, there is a playground named Charybdis Park, and its sister park on the West is named Scylla. The East side of Hell’s Gate is now a Greek neighborhood, the West side is now an athletics complex, in addition to an asylum.
On March 5th, 1917, city newspapers did not mention the opening of the new bridge, but in 1939, it was reported that an act of sabotage by the Nazis to destroy it had been foiled. Fiorello LaGuardia, the city’s mayor, said that this did not concern him. The bridge was privately owned, he said, it is not city property. The bridge is the city’s only above ground rail connection to the continental United States.
In the 17th century, three Dutch ships struck the same rock under the bridge. During the Revolution, a ship carrying wages for the British army avoided the rock, but got caught in a whirlpool and was tossed into another. It sunk, carrying gold coins to the depths.
Large ships were recommended to avoid this strait as a back door to the city’s ports, but for the centenary of the Union in 1876, City Hall sunk 15 tons of dynamite to the floor and triggered the largest explosion until the atomic bomb. Gustav was 26. On the East side of the river, workers at the Steinway piano factory watched with their families from the grassy shore. On the West side, patients in the asylum were invited to spectate. Gustav was born in a city called Brno, in Czechia, like the novelist Milan Kundera.
When I was young there was a paralyzing blizzard in the city. My parents took me for a walk in the park and we watched a barge weighed down by its cargo cut through the cascading plates of ice jockeying for position in the river.
In 1913, when construction on the bridge began, the writer Bohumil Hrabal was born in Brno, a city in Czechia. Among his most notable works are the novels Closely Watched Trains, and The Train was on Time.
My father’s grandfather, living about one mile from the bridge, watched its construction over four years. He was born by the site of the bridge, like his son, who would going on to marry a woman from a city in Ukraine, not Czechia. A series of arches to carry the tracks were the first placements, going up to Woodside, where the land rose and their dramatic height subsided. Houses were later built in the shadow of these constructions, whose backyards are framed by the arches. The towers were born after a year, and each sent out half of an arch until they met in the middle. A ⅝ inch gap was all that remained at the end which was easily made zero.
As a kid I would play sports on Ward’s Island. Often there were spectators to our events whom nobody knew. When the game was over and we would all leave they would stay, a distant look in their eyes, hands clasped on their lap.
The Czech poet Ivan Blatny was born in Brno. Most of his best-known poetry was written in the 1980s, when he lived in an asylum, suffering from paranoia.
My father worked at a steel manufacturing plant three miles from the bridge. One day, he lost his finger there in an accident (but would quickly get it back). They cast phone booths that were shipped throughout the country via the bridge.
The movie Serpico was filmed under the bridge. If you swim in the city’s largest pool, you can look at the bridge. There was a user’s community campsite under the bridge, but now there’s a community garden under the bridge.
The year I was born the painter Benjamin Moore painted the bridge a deep crimson they called Hell Gate Red. When I was young and had to be taken home from school, my teachers and my parents seemed anxious. I did not understand why. When we got back my mother closed the windows and turned on the TV, telling me that I couldn’t watch, to go play in the other room instead. I saw the bridge from the bathroom window and it was not Hell Gate Red, the visceral red of memory. It was faded in patches to a series of sad pinks, the lightest being the first areas painted. I was six. In hindsight, there were more cameras in the city after the bridge became pink. The frame shop closed, too. There were more police under the bridge. Thankfully they didn’t seal in concrete the door to bridge until after I had grown up and paid a visit.