November 13, 2017 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Ian Frazier’s wonderful “Clear Passage,” a report on the revamping of New York City’s majestic Bayonne Bridge. Frazier observes the construction from a park located at the foot of the bridge on the New Jersey side of the Kill Van Kull (“At a well-situated bench I listen to the machinery on the bridge, the shouts of the workers echoing in the steel beams, the hammering of metal on metal, and the beeping of lifter-arm vehicles backing up”). He tells about the bridge’s history and the engineer, Othmar H. Ammann, who built it, in 1931. He talks to some of the bridge workers (“On an afternoon in early spring, I talked to two painters from Ahern Contractors, in Woodside, New York, who told me that they were painting the bridge pewter-cup gray. It’s a nice shade, and everything that day—bridge, water, clouds, birds, sky—seemed to be a version of it”). He tells about the local pilots who steer the ships through the passage under the bridge. He describes the passage of the Theodore Roosevelt, “the biggest cargo ship ever to enter New York Harbor,” as it sailed under the bridge, September 7, 2017:

As the ship went by, its vast blue hull and stacked-up containers blotted out a good part of Staten Island. People exclaimed, and the cameras made their insistent cicada noises. The ship moved closer to the bridge, and closer. It appeared to have plenty of clearance. Still, many in the crowd held their breath and leaned one way or another, like football fans trying to help a field goal through the uprights using body English.

Most memorably, he describes the view that fills his windshield as he crosses the bridge:

In the arch itself, the road now goes through so high up that it’s as if you were in the bridge’s rafters. As you begin the descent, a grand scene suddenly appears before you: on the left, the vast expanse of the ports of Elizabeth and Newark, the cranes lined up like giant red-white-and-blue kitchen appliances—hand-crank juicers, maybe—with container ships docked alongside or waiting in Newark Bay, and the Passaic River joining the bay on the left, and the Hackensack River entering it up ahead, and the long I-78 bridge over the bay; and, farther off on the left, the runways of Newark Airport, the planes coming and going above it; and, beyond that, the vague gray-blue hills of New Jersey curving westward around the earth toward the rest of America.

“Clear Passage” is classic Frazier reportage – perceptive, lyrical, absorbing. I enjoyed it immensely.

Postscript: In “Clear Passage,” Frazier uses the word “whatnot” (“Orange plastic-mesh fencing bordered the road; construction vehicles and Port-O-Sans and air compressors and whatnot sat alongside”). I smiled when I read it. It reminded me of Frazier’s great Wuthering Heights parody “Linton’s Whatnots” (The New Yorker, May 11, 1992), in which Cathy reveals to Heathcliff that her husband Edgar Linton has a collection of novelty nutcrackers.