My posts will be intermittent for awhile as I recover from surgery, but I am feeling better.
My father was just as much a photo buff as I turned out to be, and while the Gowanus Expressway and Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge were going up very close to our apartment building in the early 1960s, he was there to document its construction. Actually he has the most comprehensive collection of the trenches that were dug in Bay Ridge where the expressway was going to be built, which I presented on one of FNY’s most popular pages, Bridge in the Back Yard.
As Gay Talese recounted in his recounting of the bridge’s construction, “The Bridge,” quite a few families were displaced as the Gowanus Expressway trench was dug between 66th Street and the bridge approach south of 92nd Street. The pathway was along 7th Avenue, which, when it was laid out in the late 1800s, angled away from Bay Ridge’s other numbered avenues, and then between Gatling and Dahlgren Places, two of Bay Ridge’s military-themed street names. Buildings across the street from our apartment house on Fort Hamilton Parkway were eliminated by the diktat of NYC’s traffic czar Robert Moses; at this late date, I don’t know if fair compensation for the displaced was paid.
The above photo is a curio of the period, taken by my father a few days before the expressway and bridge opening in 1964 and what we see here is state of the art in road construction for the year. The expressway boasted gleaming cylindrical light posts with mercury-bulbed GE M400s, built a at a time when most streets were still lit by incandescent bulbs in ornate cast-iron poles. The highway signs were green, a new color for them at the time, with the I-278 shield and Highway Gothic spaced lettering, still a feature today despite a brief flirtation with Clearview in the 2010s. The 84th Street pedestrian bridge (another one was placed at 72nd Street) and apartment house in the background are still in place. You can see the bare sides of several homes on 84th and 85th Streets that avoided “execution.”
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9/21/23