THE VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE

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On the Waterfront

I love Staten Island.

Let me try that again. Only this time, a little louder.

I love Staten Island.

Not all of Staten Island, mind you, and not all the time. But a lot of it, most of the time.

Mine is a straightforward, affectionate kind of love--not particularly deep or profound, not in any way extraordinary.

It's the sort of feeling that people develop for places they become rooted in without meaning to. The sort of love that comes to two people in a long partnership that grows stronger with every test it survives.

And some of it is the licking-wounds kind of love. The kind I feel when I've had more than a bellyful of the sneering derision of the New York Times and other print media toward the place I've called home since 1977.

Now, I'm making my allegiance manifest by changing the backdrop of the photo on WIT's masthead. Here's the change:

TRADING THE BROOKLYN FOR THE BAYONNE

 2006                                           

2009  (Photo by Steve Nutt)

I announced in WIT's April 20 issue that a change was on the way.  Yesterday, roughly a month later, my friend Steve Nutt and I took a replacement photo, one that shows me crossing the Bayonne Bridge instead of the Brooklyn.

Seventy-five years old this year, the Bayonne Bridge is in its own way no less striking than its older and considerably more celebrated predecessor on WIT's former masthead.

I'm delighted to have this updated, closer-to-home image representing WALKING IS TRANSPORTATION and me. Thanks, Steve.

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Comments

[Dan Icolari]

I liked your use of the word 'muscular.' I'm used to seeing the bridge from a distance, often lighted; and from that perspective, it's all form, and the structural elements recede.

But after the other day, walking around up there with those steel members flying out at odd angles over my head, I think I know what you mean.

Looming in the background is the possibility, as I'm sure you know, that we may lose the bridge, or that it may be 'renovated' to serve the needs of commerce so that it's permanently disfigured.

What I noticed up there the other day, along with the 75th anniversary banners, was an awful lot of rust.

[Bill Martin]

The Bayonne Bridges muscular profile makes it one of the most handsome bridges in the City.