First the Bridge

Photo by Jeff Burak

First the Bridge

by Jane Bernstein

In 1954, the year I turned five, my parents moved to New Jersey, and for the next forty years, whenever they were asked where they lived, they said, “Twelve miles from the George Washington Bridge.” They were New Yorkers, and until they bought a house in the northern part of the state, they’d spent their entire lives in the city. Their parents and extended family lived or were buried there. The food they loved, the stores they patronized, the museums and symphony, the botanical gardens, their memories — though neither was prone to nostalgia –- all of this was in “the city.”
        Every Saturday morning we went to New York. Before my parents decided what we might do and what route to take, I popped up from my chair and started to beg, oh please please, can we take the bridge? I had no idea where anything was located: it was simply that for me, it had to be the bridge.
        Long before I had my own relationship with the city, the bridge captured my heart, impossibly big, with massive silver towers that rose high above the Hudson, broad and powerful, as muscular as the bridge itself. I loved the way the bridge seemed cut into the Palisades, the crisscross design in the square towers, the thick cables that spanned the river below, where a tug might be pushing a barge, or a day liner cruising upstream. Then the great curve of the Manhattan shoreline, lined with solid brick apartment buildings. My aunt had bought me The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge, a children’s book about the lighthouse nestled beneath one of the towers, and I looked for it as we drove, as if one day I might be able to see it from the car.
        These Saturday trips, which always included visiting my grandparents in Brooklyn, were made up of things I loved– the bridge, for instance — and things I didn’t – having to kiss my grandparents, who seemed ancient and spoke only Yiddish. My father’s parents lived in a tenement as decrepit as they were: I held my breath as much as I could during our short stay. Baba, my mother’s mother, had a spacious apartment in an elevated building on Crown Street, across from Ebbets Field, where the Dodgers played baseball until their heartbreaking move to Los Angeles in 1957.
        And so it went, week after week, until I was thirteen: pleading with my parents to take the bridge, and if we did, gluing myself to the window as we approached; Baba’s apartment and her street, where in warm weather the old women sat in nylon webbed lawn chairs with their stockings rolled down, the rough feel of the brick, the voices I heard: Goilie, can’t you see the sign says ‘vet paint’?
        Sometimes my father left my mother, sister, and me in Manhattan, and the three of us went shopping and then took the subway, with its small windows, cane seats, and oily smell. At Union Square, where my mother, in a bargain-hunting mood, shopped for dresses, there was a huge gap between the platform and the car – dark, wet, treacherous – until the train arrived and a grid moved to close the space. Outside, a legless beggar rolled around on a wheeled cart, and steam came from the sidewalk grates, as if dragons lived below ground, and mysterious brass things, which now I know are called Siamese connections, though why they filled me with terror, I cannot say.
        The dried fruit and Indian nuts my father bought in the deli, the thick, chewy slices of pumpernickel bread at Dubrow’s– the dioramas at the natural history museum — for a very long time, I did not know that these sights and smells were part of my foundation, or that the voices and sounds were a music that lived inside me. All I felt when I was a little girl was my love for the great bridge, with its towers that rose six hundred feet and its graceful span stretching 3,500 feet across the Hudson, its cables made of strands of steel strung across the river and back again, sixty-one times. And way down at the base of its giant tower, the little red lighthouse.

 

*

        

Once, in fifth grade, my teacher, a stubby man with a crew cut named Mr. Bein, began to talk about my bridge. He said a second level was being built on the George Washington Bridge. It would be called “the Martha” because it was under George.
        I was ten years old and awed by Mr. Bein. His words, like the cheers from Ebbets Field, the Depression glass on Baba’s table, the feel of seltzer bubbles in my nose, stayed buried deep inside me until I had children of my own, and the adult me thought: really? That’s what you say to fifth graders, to anyone, really? Because she was under George?
        I remember no other mention of the bridge’s second level and nothing of the construction, which added six lanes for traffic, and never heard anyone call the lower deck “the Martha.” In 1962, when it opened, I was thirteen years old. The last of my grandparents had died, and the Saturday trips were less frequent for the four of us.
         I had permission to go to the city with my friend Betsy, whose parents were also from New York, unlike so many in our town who feared Manhattan, and went with trepidation, perhaps once a year, to see the Rockettes or the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center, or who had never gone at all, not even one time.
        Betsy and I took the bus across the bridge, where at street level the massive tower seemed to live in the neighborhood: a benign, shiny protector, so close you could nearly touch it. We caught the A train, with its shuddering cars that sped us downtown, to do what? We sat at the counter at Chock full o’Nuts and had a cream cheese on nut bread sandwich, and hung out in the cool, dark lobby of an elegant hotel, where Peter Duchin, a pianist and bandleader, played or lived, and once, to wander into Bonwit Teller, where my Aunt Fannie, my mother’s sister, worked. I knew enough to ask for her by the name she used at work — Fay, not Fannie – but not enough to realize that it was Saturday, when she’d be back in the apartment she’d shared with Baba. I bought deeply discounted women’s suspenders –a brief fad.
        The city was still malevolent to me – the steam coming from the grates, those double-headed brass pipes, the dark side streets in the garment district. But these trips gave us the chance to have an adventure, to make decisions free of parental oversight, and pursue our obsessions – Betsy’s with Peter Duchin, whose name I’d never heard before her endless, lovelorn descriptions, and mine to stand on the sidewalk in Washington Heights and feel how close I was to the bridge tower, to linger and gape until it was time to go home.

 

*

        

Then I was a teenager and shucked off everything of my family and history. I resented the broad, gray river that separated me from the city where I was meant to live. I saw myself as wholly different from the clueless strangers who’d trapped me in their split-level house, in this boring New Jersey suburb, so when I fell in love with New York, I could not see it as having any relationship whatsoever to my parents’ New York. My New York was inspired by Kerouac, Ginsburg, Kesey, and Burroughs. I wanted to live in the Village and be a beatnik, though that era was gone and all that was left was the commercial residue — some coffee houses, shops where handmade sandals were crafted from saddle leather, and tooled silver earrings were set out in glass cases.
        Now when I got off the bus at the 168th Street station, I took the A-train downtown to wander in the Village, where I peered into stores, gazed longingly at the lit windows of brownstones, and sat over espresso at the Café Figaro waiting for a life-altering encounter.
        After I got my driver’s license, I drove over the bridge, though the sheer size of the structure and all the speeding, lane-changing cars and belching trucks, filled me with terror. One Sunday morning, a neighbor stopped by my parents’ house to say he’d been on the bridge the night before and recognized my parents’ car.
        “Was that you driving?” He looked at my parents, thinking he was telling them something they did not know, and then at me. “Why were you leaning over the wheel like that?”
        Because I was clutching it in my slippery palms. Because I was afraid I might crash and die.
        Not that it mattered whether I drove or took a bus. At the end of the night, I had to return to my parents’ house, to slip into my narrow bed in my girly bedroom with its gingham curtains. I lay awake, burning with impatience. Nothing interested me apart from getting to New York, not girls with school spirit, or jocks in their letter jackets, or any of my classes, which I often cut. When I told my high school guidance counselor, a huge, pink man with a crewcut, that I was only applying to NYU he gawked. “With your grades? Don’t waste your time.”

 

*

        

I can’t say why a fat letter arrived in the mail that spring, only that New York was less glittery then, and NYU was just an urban school that my mother liked to remind me was several notches below City College, where the geniuses of her generation had gone. And so at the end of the summer, I curled in the back of my parents’ car, long dark hair, pursed lips. Sullen. Annoyed by Daddy’s smoking. Annoyed by the classical music on the radio station.
        Of course we took the bridge.
        The dorm where I’d live for the next two years was on Fifth Avenue and Tenth Street. When my mother stepped out of the car, she gestured to the stately apartment buildings that lined lower Fifth Avenue and to the arch, two blocks away in Washington Square Park. “You know,” she raised her chin in a haughty way, “you now have the most elegant address in the city.”
        Cit-hee.
        I looked at her blankly—like I care? They were from Brooklyn, gloomy and uncool, the borough to flee. Already I knew that their New York had no resemblance whatsoever to mine, just as their memories and values, their music, the Yiddish sprinkled into their speech, belonged to the world I was desperate to escape.
         I hugged them goodbye, unpacked my boxes and bags and began my new life. From that day, I felt completely at home. I might complain about the dirty streets or envy a friend who lived in an actual house, but New York was my home the way my hands were my hands and my feet were my feet.

 

*

        

On occasion I took the subway uptown, but for the next sixteen years, downtown was where I lived, much of the time in a rent-stabilized, fifth-floor railroad flat in a well-kept tenement on Grove, a lovely little West Village street with ginkgo trees. I loved my apartment building with its nosy, energetic super, and the Nanini siblings, who’d been born and raised in the same small apartment where they still lived.
         The street is listed in many guidebooks, and often when I walked west from my building, tourists were clustered around the iron gates at Grove Court to view the six pre-Civil War era townhouses recessed from the street. One weekend, a childhood friend came to visit. Eager to show off my neighborhood, I took her on a tour that began with Grove Court, continued on to the oldest house in the Village, and then to a bar called Chumley’s, a former speakeasy that still had its unmarked entrance. Dusk was approaching as we continued west to the river.
        “Is it safe to walk here?” My friend clutched my arm. I saw through her eyes the hulking warehouses and light industry that lined the avenues, the sections of the elevated West Side Highway that were still intact. I squeezed her hand and reassured her.
        The riverfront was not beautiful then, and the piers that remained were rotted. You could see rats scurrying, and hasty sexual encounters between strangers, but the river smelled alive, and in the distance was the George Washington Bridge, as soft as a charcoal drawing. It was like seeing a dear old friend.
        Five years had passed since I’d lived with my parents, and now gazing at the bridge, all that I knew about the bridge rushed into my mind. I wanted to tell my friend about the hundreds of thousands of yards of concrete necessary for the anchorages and roadways, the tons of galvanized steel wire for the cables, enough wire to stretch halfway to the moon. I remembered that 43,000 tons of steel went into building that bridge, and that the name of the Swiss-born structural engineer was Othmar Ammann, whose other bridges included the Verrazano-Narrows that connected Brooklyn and Staten Island. This later bridge, which opened in 1964, had a longer span than my bridge and was undeniably beautiful, with a graceful sweep across the water. Its namesake, Giovanni da Verrazano, was the first European to explore the Atlantic coast between New Brunswick and Florida. In his journals, he’d described the way the Palisades rose vertically as looking like a “fence of stakes.”
        I began to tell my friend about the geology class I’d taken in my last year at NYU and that I’d seen this “fence of stakes” on a field trip to the Palisades, but she tugged on my arm and begged. “Please. I think we should go back.”

 

*

        

As a single person, I could not imagine living anywhere but New York City.
        Then I got married and had a baby and couldn’t imagine living anywhere but New York City. It was like trying to envision life in a distant galaxy. Only now I knew it was perverse to live in the same walkup, where every day I had to haul my baby, stroller, and groceries up the five worn flights into the small, crusty apartment. My husband installed bookshelves to the ceiling and built a loft bed with a work space beneath. We stored our boots and the baby’s toys in the hall.
        Even if we had had the money to move to a larger apartment, it was hard to live in New York in the late 1970s when city services had broken down and crime was rampant. Stepping down into the subway was a descent into hell; the trains were filthy and covered in graffiti. Someone threw a beer bottle from the train onto the platform, just missing where I stood. You had to double-check an empty seat before daring to sit.
        On the way back from a vacation one summer, we asked each other: Why are we doing this?
        We took the Tappan Zee Bridge, a cantilever bridge twenty-five miles north of the city, instead of the George Washington Bridge, which was always too congested. As we came close to the city, the traffic thickened on its weedy broken-up roads. Living in New York was hard. The streets were dirty, everything we ate or used was overpriced, and for what?
        I stepped out of the car, took in the stench of dog shit. I slung as many bags as I could over my shoulder, unbuckled my daughter from the car seat, and took her in my arms. A man, drunk or mentally ill, or both, waved his arms and veered toward us, railing. I fumbled for my keys to open the building door.
        While my husband searched for a parking space, I started up the five flights to our apartment. My little girl was old enough to walk and I begged her, “Please, sweetie, one more step! Up you go! Good girl!”
        I waited, letting the bags slip from my aching shoulders. “One more! Almost home!”
        I looped the bags back onto my shoulder and followed her until eventually we were at our door, where I lifted her, brushed off the knees of her overalls, dropped my bags gently, then carried her to the sink to wash off her hands.
        Enough. It was stressful to live like this, stress on top of stress, like the loft bed atop the desk. You fall out of love under these conditions, or think you do. You become a glass-half-full person, make the move and celebrate … whatever.
        First stop, New Jersey: a rundown house in a town twenty-four miles from the Holland Tunnel. I had a second daughter by then. Now with a baby and a preschooler, I had no time to miss New York, no time to listen to music, go to the movies, hang out with friends, clean the toilet, moon over bridges. Babyland was where I lived, with swim classes and play dates and doctors’ appointments.
        Then, in 1991, Pittsburgh, which remains my permanent home.
        When asked where I’m from, I say, “I live in Pittsburgh.”
        Pittsburgh, nicknamed “City of bridges.”

 

*

        

From the start I knew that moving to Pittsburgh to take a position at a university there was the best decision I ever made. Here in this vibrant, affordable, Little-Engine-That-Could kind of city, working its way back from its industrial decline, we could afford to buy a beautiful house near the university where I taught, with a dining room and bedrooms. Neighbors greeted us with wine and a new broom. The morning the moving van pulled up another couple brought us a Thermos full of coffee, and two clean cups.
        People are so nice, I said.
        No way I’d still be a writer if I lived in New York.
        Late one afternoon, after my classes were over, I walked past a row of parked cars outside my building, and seeing the license plates from West Virginia and Ohio I thought I’m really far from home.
        After that, when I saw those license plates, I chided myself: Stop with the melancholy! Your life is so much better here.
        It was, too, in every way. I was trying to feel it fully.
        Whenever I invited a writer to be part of our reading series, I took my guest on a tour past the Cathedral of Learning, across the Birmingham Bridge to the overlook on Mount Washington, where you can see the way the Monongahela and Allegheny Rivers join to form the Ohio, and the bridges, one after another, into the distance.
        Sometimes I said, “Pittsburgh has more bridges than anywhere but Venice,” and sometimes I said, “Pittsburgh has the most bridges of any city.”
        The rivers are narrow compared to the Hudson and the bridges look miniature. The Smithfield Bridge, a lenticular truss bridge, with cast-iron towers and six copper finials on top of its portals is my favorite. It’s blue, yellow, and brown, unlike so many of the other bridges, which are painted Aztec Gold, the official color of the city and its sports teams. The bridge crosses the Monongahela River, with a span of 1,184 feet, compared to my bridge’s span of 4,760 feet, and a clearance of 42.5 feet, while my bridge is two hundred thirteen feet above the Hudson.
        One year, standing on the overlook in Mount Washington, a writer friend from New York said, “This place is amazing.”
        I nodded, agreeing, felt a pang of homesickness.
        “It’s an interesting city,” she said. “It’s beautiful. It’s got history. And your life here is good.”
        “I know,” I said, because I did know.
        What was the big deal that I didn’t live in New York, when it was less than four hundred miles away? I had arrived in Pittsburgh by choice, spoke the same language as the natives, made friends, loved being at the university, built the kind of fine, productive life I could never have achieved in New York.
        Whenever I visited New York, I was thrust into what I most disliked about the city: the wrecked infrastructure, the traffic snarled on torn-up crisscrossing arteries, Penn Station, an ugly and chaotic subterranean space, the airports far away. Aren’t you glad you’re not here? I asked myself. Isn’t it better, saner the way you live? I pushed through these harsh gateways and found the sweet places, the people I missed, the streets in favorite neighborhoods. But I always felt an edge of sadness, for these visits had the kind of Cinderella quality I’d felt as a teenager stuck on the New Jersey side: I could put on my pretty clothes and go out to the ball, but at midnight, I’d be back in my life, my real life, in Pittsburgh, the lovely, vital city that was my actual home.

 

*

        

One summer, five years after my divorce, I sublet an apartment in New York. My older daughter was living in Brooklyn by then and the younger one was in camp in the Catskills. Though I had always lived in the Village, East and West, the apartment a friend helped me find was on West 94th Street, on the Upper West Side.
        As soon as I unpacked, I left the apartment and headed down Broadway, fitting myself into the stream of dogwalkers, old people being wheeled by caregivers or pushing walkers, children in T-shirts and blinking sneakers, Con Ed workers in Day-Glo vests, commuters rising from subway entrances, into this neighborhood, which was just a neighborhood, not a place to visit unless you lived or worked there.
        I wrote a lot that month, staying in for hours with no restlessness or sense of isolation, because when I left the apartment, everything was right there. I ran along the bikeway that parallels the Hudson and on Sundays, I met my friend Ginger at the Eleanor Roosevelt statue on 72nd and Riverside Park, and we rode our bikes uptown and across the George Washington Bridge, sharing the narrow walkway with pedestrians and other bikers, then continuing onward to Nyack. On the return from our long ride, we paused to look down at the broad river, the wedge-shaped wakes made by boats, the tennis courts and rows of buildings below. It was so big and beautiful.
        Being back in the city for a long, uninterrupted stay was like sloughing off a heavy overcoat. It was as if I had been hidden beneath the layers.
        After that, I began subletting an apartment for a month each summer. For the first days, all I wanted to do was walk down the streets in my neighborhood. I walked in the mornings and late at night, exchanging quick glances with passersby, taking in the voices, the tiny human dramas around me, ravenous for this kind of street life. Then on Sunday I met up with my friend Ginger and biked across the bridge.
        I sublet in Brooklyn, too. I liked the human scale in Brooklyn, its youthful verve, and Prospect Park, another of Fredrick Olmstead’s urban jewels, smaller and less touristed than Central Park. I was surprised by how much I recalled from all those long-ago Saturday trips with my parents, after all the years of burying them — the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Arch at Grand Army Plaza, the Japanese Garden at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens.
        My mother was still alive, and I tried to describe all the ways the borough had changed. Real estate in Crown Heights is expensive, I told her. Williamsburg is full of hipsters. “Hipster” wasn’t part of her vocabulary, and she could not seem to grasp that the neighborhood where she’d lived with her immigrant family was chic, so one summer my daughter and I took her for a tour. The street where she’d lived as a child was no longer on the map; my grandmother’s building had been razed. But she loved seeing the Brooklyn Bridge. Isn’t it the most beautiful bridge in the world? she asked.
        Sure. I shrugged. I admired the bridge and its view of the harbor, but the hordes of tourists made it difficult to cross by foot or bike, and I often found myself thinking that it was unfair that this bridge garnered all the attention. Yes, it was stunning and the back story was dramatic, with John Roebling dying of tetanus, and his son, incapacitated by the bends, like so many of the workers, and the construction was a greater feat of engineering, since it was designed and completed nearly half a century before my bridge.
        People, go north! I thought, seeing that my bridge was far down on a TripAdvisor list of “things to do in New York City.” I sought to rectify that by writing a review in which I called the view from the walkway of the George Washington Bridge breathtaking and added that “the bridge itself is awesome,” which of course it is.

 

*

        

I reached an age where people I knew were retiring, several in Florida or the Carolinas. Though I wasn’t ready to stop teaching or leave Pittsburgh, a month in New York was no longer enough time in the city. Thanks to my parents’ frugality, I’d inherited some money after they died and began to look for an apartment on the Upper West Side. Summer after summer, I looked. The city’s fortunes had changed and changed again, and the only apartments in my price range were coffin-like studios. Realtors brought me to different neighborhoods, to the east or north or center of the narrow island, but I rejected everything. I didn’t just want a pied-a-terre: I wanted to feel that I was home.
        When at last I found the perfect apartment in a neighborhood I loved, I wished I could tell my parents. I could hear my mother say, “You know, there’s no other cit-hee like it.”
        Finally, I was mature enough to agree.
        It’s on the sixteenth floor of a turn-of-the-century building on West 102nd Street and Broadway. In my eyes, the neighborhood is perfect: one block east, on Amsterdam Avenue, men play dominoes on small tables set out on the sidewalk, and in summer you can buy ices from carts. When you walk, you hear Spanish and English, see lots of children and old people and families going to church in their Sunday best. A little farther east are housing projects, luxury apartments, and the kinds of stores seen all over the country – Whole Foods, TJ Maxx – and then the quiet, hilly sections of the northern part of Central Park. To the west of my building is West End Avenue and Riverside Drive, both Historic Districts, so no skyscrapers can be built on these avenues that parallel the river. There’s a wonderful sense of serenity and permanence. Cross Riverside Drive and you’re in Riverside Park, another Olmstead park, with wooded sections and the uninterrupted bike and pedestrian path that runs along the river itself.
        When I’m asked why I bought an apartment in New York, I say that one of my daughters is in Brooklyn, and that my oldest friends live in or just outside the city. But it’s so much more than that – I have a daughter and friends in Pittsburgh, too. When I walk in my neighborhood, I feel at home in a way I haven’t experienced since I lived in the city long ago. Home, because when I am here I feel without self-consciousness. It’s as if the outer shell of my being softens and I merge with this place and absorb the voices and faces of people I pass. Hey goilie! Can’t you see the sign says vet paint! That particular voice is long gone, but I never yearned for that particular voice, never sought to recreate memories of my childhood or nostalgia for my years in the city as a college student or young mother. It’s that the voices and sounds are my music and evoke this subtle, powerful sense that I am home. The sensory feast, the size, yes; the mass and enormity, the hive of beings, the texture of the built city, the giant silver towers.

 

*

        

In the summer, I wake very early on Sunday mornings, so I can start on my bike ride over the George Washington Bridge before it gets too hot. My route has remained much the same since Ginger and I began these rides in 2002. I head up Riverside Drive, leafy and untrafficked on these mornings, and in Washington Heights take the long steep climb up to the bike path on the George Washington Bridge. Below us, the broad Hudson, a sailboat or two, a power boat leaving a wedge-shaped wake. On the New Jersey side, we bike up route 9W to the Ranger Station, the stone headquarters for the New Jersey Parkway Police, and a popular stop for bikers. We then cross over the state line once more, into Rockland County, pause for coffee at a favorite shop, and on our return, take River Road, a hilly seven-mile stretch of road between the steep cliffs of the Palisades and the Hudson River.
        When we set off down River Road, the Hudson is hidden behind heavy foliage. Then suddenly it appears, wide and mighty, glistening in the sun. Downhill, there’s a narrow sandy stretch of shoreline, and then, as you bike back uphill, the river disappears. You have to pedal a few more miles before you get a first glimpse of the bridge, after which, like the river, it appears intermittently, each time from a different vantage point, until, after a long ride downhill, the massive silver towers loom very close until you ride beneath the bridge, where you can look straight up at its underbelly. On this day, scaffolding is at the sides of the lower roadway, used by structural engineers who inspect and maintain the bridge, checking the bolts and joints and walking along the barrel cables. This cycle of work takes two years to complete, at which point it begins again.
        Every Sunday I am awed by this bridge, by its size and strength, and the beauty of its design, and I recall the words of architect Le Corbusier, who, like me, thought it the most beautiful bridge in the world. “Between water and sky, you see nothing but bent cord supported by two steel towers…” he wrote. “The two towers rise so high that it brings you happiness; their structure is so pure, so resolute, so regular that here, finally, steel architecture seems to laugh.”
        On the way back, we pause midway on the bridge, look out again at the Hudson and then continue home. Once I am back on the city streets, the ride home is short. My apartment is four miles from the George Washington Bridge.

Photo by Brian G