Overview:
What once was the longest suspension bridge in the world has now spanned six decades of New York City history.
Thursday marks 60 years since drivers first paid a 50-cent toll to drive over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the towering 13,200-foot link that connects Staten Island to Brooklyn.
“Before the Verrazzano, think of Staten Island — it was not connected to any of the other boroughs, other than by a ferry,” Stuart Rankin, a senior vice president at WSP, the global engineering firm that designed and still maintains the bridge, told THE CITY. “It was connected to New Jersey: you had the Goethals [Bridge], you had the Bayonne [Bridge], you had the Outerbridge Crossing.
“But Staten Island was not connected to the rest of New York.”
Although it is still America’s longest suspension bridge, it lost its #1 in the world spot in 1981 and is now not even in the top 10. Still, the Verrazzano-Narrows has served as the scenic starting point of the New York City Marathon since 1976 and was a constant presence in the 1977 John Travolta movie “Saturday Night Fever.”
Its primary role, of course, is moving motorists across its two decks and 13 lanes — with the bridge averaging more than 220,000 vehicle crossings per day and 80.3 million for all of 2023, according to the MTA.
That is 375% more traffic than in 1965, when the bridge named for Giovanni da Verrazzano — the first European explorer to sail into New York Harbor — averaged 48,300 vehicle crossings daily and had 17.6 million in its first full year of operation.
Much has changed since Nov. 21, 1964, when a Cadillac convertible driven by a 22-year-old Staten Island man became the first vehicle to be tolled on the Verrazzano — whose name was incorrectly spelled with a single ‘z’ until 2018 because of a typo on its construction contract.
But significant portions of the bridge remain from when Othmar Hermann Ammann designed it.
“The cables are original, the towers, the suspender ropes, the truss itself,” said Jonathan Morey, senior bridge engineer at WSP, which evolved out of Ammann & Whitney.
The impact of Ammann, who Rankin described as a “true visionary,” can be felt daily by millions of motorists in the region — the Swiss-born engineer also helped design the George Washington and Bayonne bridges and directed the planning and construction of the Lincoln Tunnel.
“They didn’t know what traffic volumes and weights of vehicles would be like in 60 years or 100 years or 150 years from when the bridge was designed,” said Rankin, a leader in WSP’s national bridges and structures practice. “So it’s an art — engineering is an art that has to design for the unknown.”
What has remained in flux is the Verrazzano’s toll: one-way trips on passenger vehicles equipped with E-ZPass presently cost $6.94.
A second deck was added in 1969 to a bridge originally built with 1.4 million tons of concrete, 218,000 tons of steel and 143,000 miles of cable wire.
Maintenance and Upgrades
Officials describe upkeep of the structure originally constructed for $325 million as a near-daily duty.
The maintenance can include work such as structural painting, patching potholes, changing lighting fixtures or repairing the bridge’s fences and guardrails.
A heavier lift that’s in the works is to dehumidify the cables that drape between the suspension bridge’s 693-foot-high towers to help stop corrosion.
“It’s essentially the pumping of dry air into the cable, which purges the moisture,” Morey said.
The MTA earlier this year put out a solicitation for firms to design, build and install a dehumidification system for the Verrazano’s four cables, a multi-year effort expected to cost north of $100 million.
“We want to protect the structure itself from accelerated corrosion,” Catherine Sheridan, president of MTA Bridges and Tunnels, told THE CITY. “Corrosion, once it accelerates, is really costly.”
According to the MTA, the lifting of the pause on congestion pricing should allow the agency to start that project next year, along with one to build new ramps and overhaul existing ones on the Brooklyn side of the Verrazzano.
As part of that project, the MTA will reconstruct exits from one side of the bridge onto the Belt Parkway.
“This project is going to eliminate that left-hand exit, move it to a right-hand exit,” Sheridan said. “We think we can reduce accidents at that location by 25%, which is big.”
There are also long-term plans to rehabilitate the lower-level deck along its suspended spans and ongoing efforts to condition the bridge for heavier vehicles, such as electric cars.
“Every aspect we do to maintain the bridge has some kind of carbon impact,” Morey said. “So we have to then balance the use of the electric vehicles with, how do we best maintain the bridge and overall, make sure we’re not having a huge impact on the environment.”
Long dreamed-about plans to add pedestrian or bicycle access to the Verrazzano could be trickier, the engineers say, because of potential changes to how the bridge responds to wind.
”When we do structural modifications to the bridge, we don’t want to make the bridge more susceptible to movement, undulations, vibrations, fluttering,” Rankin said. “We want to avoid that.”
A 2023 MTA report on cycling, micromobility and pedestrian access to MTA bridges outlined the many steps needed to make a bridge retrofit a reality.
“Retrofitting the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge with pedestrian and cycling paths is a long-term endeavor requiring feasibility studies and several major capital projects over several years,” noted the report titled “Extending Transit’s Reach.”
Officials said that keeping the superstructures in excellent condition for decades is a top priority.
“These aren’t disposable bridges,” Sheridan said. “These are bridges that you can’t replace easily, these are multibillion-dollar structures, you have to keep them in a state of good repair.”
What once was the longest suspension bridge in the world has now spanned six decades of New York City history.
Thursday marks 60 years since drivers first paid a 50-cent toll to drive over the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, the towering 13,200-foot link that connects Staten Island to Brooklyn.
“Before the Verrazzano, think of Staten Island — it was not connected to any of the other boroughs, other than by a ferry,” Stuart Rankin, a senior vice president at WSP, the global engineering firm that designed and still maintains the bridge, told THE CITY. “It was connected to New Jersey: you had the Goethals [Bridge], you had the Bayonne [Bridge], you had the Outerbridge Crossing.
“But Staten Island was not connected to the rest of New York.”
Although it is still America’s longest suspension bridge, it lost its #1 in the world spot in 1981 and is now not even in the top 10. Still, the Verrazzano-Narrows has served as the scenic starting point of the New York City Marathon since 1976 and was a constant presence in the 1977 John Travolta movie “Saturday Night Fever.”
Its primary role, of course, is moving motorists across its two decks and 13 lanes — with the bridge averaging more than 220,000 vehicle crossings per day and 80.3 million for all of 2023, according to the MTA.
That is 375% more traffic than in 1965, when the bridge named for Giovanni da Verrazzano — the first European explorer to sail into New York Harbor — averaged 48,300 vehicle crossings daily and had 17.6 million in its first full year of operation.
Much has changed since Nov. 21, 1964, when a Cadillac convertible driven by a 22-year-old Staten Island man became the first vehicle to be tolled on the Verrazzano — whose name was incorrectly spelled with a single ‘z’ until 2018 because of a typo on its construction contract.
But significant portions of the bridge remain from when Othmar Hermann Ammann designed it.
“The cables are original, the towers, the suspender ropes, the truss itself,” said Jonathan Morey, senior bridge engineer at WSP, which evolved out of Ammann & Whitney.
The impact of Ammann, who Rankin described as a “true visionary,” can be felt daily by millions of motorists in the region — the Swiss-born engineer also helped design the George Washington and Bayonne bridges and directed the planning and construction of the Lincoln Tunnel.
“They didn’t know what traffic volumes and weights of vehicles would be like in 60 years or 100 years or 150 years from when the bridge was designed,” said Rankin, a leader in WSP’s national bridges and structures practice. “So it’s an art — engineering is an art that has to design for the unknown.”
What has remained in flux is the Verrazzano’s toll: one-way trips on passenger vehicles equipped with E-ZPass presently cost $6.94.
A second deck was added in 1969 to a bridge originally built with 1.4 million tons of concrete, 218,000 tons of steel and 143,000 miles of cable wire.
Long-Running Maintenance and Upgrades
Officials describe upkeep of the structure originally constructed for $325 million as a near-daily duty.
The maintenance can include work such as structural painting, patching potholes, changing lighting fixtures or repairing the bridge’s fences and guardrails.
A heavier lift that’s in the works is to dehumidify the cables that drape between the suspension bridge’s 693-foot-high towers to help stop corrosion.
“It’s essentially the pumping of dry air into the cable, which purges the moisture,” Morey said.
The MTA earlier this year put out a solicitation for firms to design, build and install a dehumidification system for the Verrazano’s four cables, a multi-year effort expected to cost north of $100 million.
“We want to protect the structure itself from accelerated corrosion,” Catherine Sheridan, president of MTA Bridges and Tunnels, told THE CITY. “Corrosion, once it accelerates, is really costly.”
According to the MTA, the lifting of the pause on congestion pricing should allow the agency to start that project next year, along with one to build new ramps and overhaul existing ones on the Brooklyn side of the Verrazzano.
As part of that project, the MTA will reconstruct exits from one side of the bridge onto the Belt Parkway.
“This project is going to eliminate that left-hand exit, move it to a right-hand exit,” Sheridan said. “We think we can reduce accidents at that location by 25%, which is big.”
There are also long-term plans to rehabilitate the lower-level deck along its suspended spans and ongoing efforts to condition the bridge for heavier vehicles, such as electric cars.
-
Workers on the Verrazzano Bridge in the early 1960s. Credit: Courtesy of WSP -
The Verrazzano Bridge mid-construction in the early 1960s. Credit: Courtesy of WSP -
An archival postcard shows the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge soon after its opening. Credit: Via the New York Public Library -
The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge towers over the water separating Brooklyn and Staten Island. Nov. 18, 2024. Credit: Jose Martinez/THE CITY
“Every aspect we do to maintain the bridge has some kind of carbon impact,” Morey said. “So we have to then balance the use of the electric vehicles with, how do we best maintain the bridge and overall, make sure we’re not having a huge impact on the environment.”
Long dreamed-about plans to add pedestrian or bicycle access to the Verrazzano could be trickier, the engineers say, because of potential changes to how the bridge responds to wind.
”When we do structural modifications to the bridge, we don’t want to make the bridge more susceptible to movement, undulations, vibrations, fluttering,” Rankin said. “We want to avoid that.”
A 2023 MTA report on cycling, micromobility and pedestrian access to MTA bridges outlined the many steps needed to make a bridge retrofit a reality.
“Retrofitting the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge with pedestrian and cycling paths is a long-term endeavor requiring feasibility studies and several major capital projects over several years,” noted the report titled “Extending Transit’s Reach.”
Officials said that keeping the superstructures in excellent condition for decades is a top priority.
“These aren’t disposable bridges,” Sheridan said. “These are bridges that you can’t replace easily, these are multibillion-dollar structures, you have to keep them in a state of good repair.”
