Some awesomely quaint black-and-white footage of the construction of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was posted on YouTube yesterday by stock footage vendor F.I.L.M Archives, which we stumbled across via the Bensonhurst Bean. In it, construction works hop, acrobat-like, from structural pillar to girder to fencing, in order to build what was, at the time of its unveiling in 1964, the longest suspension bridge in the world. The best part? When a wry narrator intones: "New Yorkers don't really care about that. Most of them won't even bother to go down to the end of the island and look at it. It takes a lot to impress a New Yorker." Those with vertigo, beware, because there are a lot of pans from up high of Brooklyn, Staten Island, and the waterway below. (That cameraman must have been perched on the bridge alongside workers, with nary a safety harness in sight.) The score that overlays the constructoporn scenes is cheery and upbeat despite the deathly falls that seem imminent; a shot of the completed bridge is accompanied by chords that seem to scream "This Is A Triumph Of Infrastructure."
· Old Video Surfaces Showing Verrazano Bridge Under Construction [BB]
· More Video Interludes [Curbed]
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