SIX BRIDGES: The Legacy of Othmar H. Ammann

SIX BRIDGES: The Legacy of Othmar H. Ammann. ============================================

By Darl Rastorfer. Yale Univ. Press. 188 pp. $39.95

The destiny of New York City has always rested on water. The great harbor gave birth to the city. The Hudson River provided an inland artery. The Erie Canal connected the Hudson to the heartland, guaranteeing the fortunes of the metropolis. Yet if water was a boon to the city’s preeminence as a commercial entrepôt, it was also a bane to physical expansion and economic efficiency. Bounded by water, the city could develop only northward until George Augustus Roebling’s epic bridging of the East River united Brooklyn and New York in 1983. The bridge brought about the demise of Brooklyn’s independence and the eventual creation of Greater New York, a city sprawled across three islands (Manhattan, Staten Island, and Long Island), with only one borough, the Bronx, on the mainland of the United States.

Welding this archipelago into a coherent metropolitan whole required a vast and farflung infrastructure, including tunnels, railway terminals, and more bridges. Six of the most important bridges were designed by a Swissborn engineer named Othmar Ammann, the subject of this lucidly written and generously illustrated book.

Ammann’s initial break came as inspector of construction on the Hell Gate Bridge. In 1923, he decided to submit plans for New York City’s first bridge across the Hudson. His employer and mentor, Hell Gate designer Gustav Lindenthal, envisioned a gargantuan structure of 28 traffic lanes on a half-mile span, supported by cables strung from two massive granite towers. Lindenthal’s drawings, reproduced in this book, show a plan captive to the expansive and overstuffed instincts of the Victorian Age, an architectural rendering in which exuberance passes over into sheer excess. By contrast, Ammann’s design is an avatar of the modern— a slim, lithe, liberated Daisy Buchanan against Lindenthal’s dowager empress. The generational divide between old master and brilliant apprentice was unbridgeable. When the recently formed Port Authority of New York and New Jersey chose Ammann’s design, a star was born.

The George Washington Bridge is, in Rastorfer’s estimation, "the most significant long-span suspension bridge" of the 20th century. Part of its significance is owed to the sleek elegance of the design, and part to parsimoniousness: The Port Authority felt compelled by the Great Depression to cut back on expenses, so it tossed aside Ammann’s plan to dress the steel towers in stone. The serendipitous result was to heighten "the machined profile and transparency of the unfinished construction," creating a prototype for the stellar feats of bridge building that Ammann would complete over the next 35 years.

In the style of Ammann’s six bridges—the George Washington, Bayonne, Triborough, Whitestone, Throgs Neck, and Verrazano— Rastorfer’s account of the 20th century’s pontifex maximus is spare and clean, free of superfluous detail. Rastorfer, curator of the Cooper Hewitt Museum exhibition Six Bridges, is equally enlightening about the theory behind the masterpieces and about Ammann’s relationship with Robert Moses, the nonpareil power broker who paved the way for their construction. Six Bridges is a long-overdue tribute to perhaps the greatest artist-engineer of all time, and a poignant reminder of the heroic age that preceded the ethereal sway of cyberspace, an age when men labored, Prometheus-like, against the corporeal constraints of heaven and nature.

—Peter Quinn

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