Where Did the Norwegian Families Go Whe the Vearrazzano Bridge Was Built
Two Families, Displaced Five Years Ago by Narrows Bridge, Assess Their New Homes: ANGER LINGERING AS BRIDGE GOES UP; Dispossessed of Bay Ridge Still Talk Bitterly About Eviction 5 Years Ago; MOST STAY IN SECTION; Few Chose to Settle Far From Verrazano Bridge and Few Change Ways
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June 19, 1964
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The robin‐red towers of the bridge shoot 690 feet up from the Narrows and dominate the skyline along the western shore of Brooklyn, making everything below—the churches, the homes, the people—seem drab and insignificant.
When completed in November, the Verrazano - Narrows Bridge will be the largest suspension bridge in the world, and already its graceful design, its rainbow reach across the waters between Brooklyn and Staten Island have awed both. engineers and esthetes.
Yet there are people who hate the bridge. To them it is not poetry, merely steel—implacable and unnecessary.
Most of these people live in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, a quiet residential area where five years ago 800 homes had to be demolished and 7,000 persons dispossessed to make room for an expressway to the bridge.
Though most of these 7,000 have since found or been shown to new homes in Bay Ridge, and though all were compensated for their hardship—and many seem even better off because of the move—much bitterness persists.
In some cases the anger is as alive today as it was in 1959 when "Save Bay Ridge" banners flew in Brooklyn; when people screamed "That bridge—who needs it ?"; when clergymen damned the bridge from the pulpit for diminishing their parishes; when the anti‐bridge faction included the disparate likes of housewives, bartenders, tugboat skippers, teetotalers, doctors, lawyers, a former Ziegfeld Follies girl, a retired prizefighter, a family of 17 children, two dogs and a cat, and hundreds of others who reacted generally as people anywhere might react if, suddenly, the order was delivered: "Abandon your homes—we must build a bridge."
None of the bridge's agents ever used such language, of course, but even if they had, the response in Bay Ridge could not have been more vitriolic.
One dispossessed shoemaker cursed the bridge authorities so loud and long that a policeman had to be called to restrain him.
Another man threatened to punch the nose of a Brooklyn real estate man, John B. Swift, who was commissioned to help move 1,430 of the 1,800 uprooted Bay Ridge families.
Many women cried when they learned they would have to move. Others prayed that it was just a bad dream. Other people refused to believe it ("Yeah, I'll move when they show me that bridge"), or announced, boldly, "If they want to get me out of this house, they'll have to carry me out bodily."
One family moved out peacefully — but, when nobody was watching, moved back in again. One younger woman flirted with bridge authorities, hoping she could charm them out of evicting her.
Many people displayed no reaction; they just moved quietly away without a word or whimper. A few did not move until demolition crews had all but broken down their walls, but it was not contempt for authority that caused their tardiness; rather—despite all the publicity, all the protest, all the noise that wrecking teams were making across the street and next door—these few were totally unaware that a bridge was going to be built and they would have to move.
"Have you found a new apartment yet, Mr. Johnson?" one relocation man asked, trying to hide his astonishment at discovering this one man living alone in a completely evacuated apartment house in a complete‐ly abandoned block.
"New apartment?" the man asked, quizzically.
"Yes, Mr. Johnson, they're tearing down this building for the new bridge."
"Bridge?" the man repeated, his eyebrows rising, "they're building a bridge ?"
In all, it took 18 months to move out the 7,000 people. Eventually even the most stubborn—or out‐of-touch residents of Bay Ridge abandoned their homes because of resignation or dear—fear of being alone in a spookly neighborhood; fear of the bands of young vagrants who occasionally would roam the area smashing windows or sealing doors, picket fences, light fixtures, or shrubbery; fear of the derelicts who would sleep in empty apartments or hallways; fear of the rats that people said would soon be crawling up from the shattered sinks or sewers because, it was explained, "rats also are being dispossessed" in Bay Ridge.
"Oh, those were depressing days?" recalls Bessie Gros Dempsey, the former Follies girl who now lives four blocks from the spot where her old home stood: "When those demolition men moved unto the neighborhood you'd have flower pots full of dust on your window sills at night, and all day long you'd see them smashing down those lovely homes across the street.
"That crane was like the jaw of a monster, and when it" cracked into those buildings, into the roof and ceiling and shingles, everything would turn into powder, and then the dogs would start barking because of all the strange sounds a building makes when it is falling.
"I remember back of where I used to live was this big brownstone — an artist lived there, and the place was built like an Irish castle. When the crape hit into it, it was horrible sound I'll never forget."
"And I remember," she went on, "watching them tear down that Colonial house that was directly across the street from me. It had columns in front, and a screened‐in porch, and it was lived in by a nice elderly couple that had twin daughters, and also an uncle, Jack, a crippled fellow who used to trim those hedges. Such pride was in that home, and what a pity to see that crane smash it all down."
The couple with the twin daughters now lives in upstate New York, Mrs. Dempsey said, adding that she did not know what became of the crippled uncle named Jack. The artist who lived in the brownstone behind her old home is dead, Mrs. Dempsey said, along with five other people she used to know in her neighborhood in the pre‐bridge days.
Mrs. Dempsey and many others in Bay Ridge often cite the bridge as an accomplice in the death of residents of the old neighborhood; they say that the tension and frustration in losing one's home, and the uncertainty of the future, all contributed to the death of many in the last five years.
One woman declares that her husband, never ill before, suddenly had a heart attack and died after a "Save Bay Ridge" rally. Another blames the bridge for her faltering eyesight, saying she never had to wear glasses until the announcement that her home would be de‑ stroyed because of "that, bridge."
For a while, back in the late summer of 1959, the bridge seemed to promise political "death" to politicians who might praise it, or admit that the bridge was "progress."
On the day groundbreaking ceremonies were being held for the bridge, State Senator William T. Conklin of Brooklyn snapped: "It is not a groundbreaking. To many it will be heartbreaking. Any public official attending should always be identified in the future with the cruelty that has been inflicted on the community in the name of progress."
Governor Rockefeller, invited to attend the ceremony, sent a telegram expressing regret that a prior engagement made it impossible for him to be there. He designated Assembly Speaker Joseph F. Carlin to read his message. But Mr. Carlino did not show up. Robert Moses had to read it.
Today the bridge would not be shunned in such a manner, of course, for while the anger still simmers within some Bay Ridge residents, the politicians now regard the bridge as a dead issue.
"Most people in Bay Ridge have learned to live with the bridge, since we have no choice," says the editor of The Brooklyn Spectator, Joseph Hasson, although he admits that those who were dispossessed by the bridge have long memories.
Today Msgr. Edward J. Sweeney, whose parish at St. Ephrem's Roman Catholic Church lost 2,000 of its 12,000 members because the expressway cut right through the neighborhood, still laments this type of "progress," and Mrs. William Sivillo, a housewife, still misses her old neighborhood that is now leveled into a long, smooth piece of concrete.
The undertaker, Joseph V. Sessa, who in 1959 did not move but was worried that he would lose thousands of people "from which to draw," today concedes that his business has not been hurt much by the move. But he still says, "Personally, I'd rather have things the way they were."
Even some who admit that the change was for the better—such as the dentist, Henry Amen, who now has a prosperous practice one mile north of his old office—are quick to say, "I strongly resent the idea of being forced to move."
Some older people who owned their homes, particularly older people on pensions or small fixed incomes, say that the relocation caused them financial hardships. The price they received for their old homes—evaluated by an impartial appraiser and bought by the city—could not match the price of a new home of comparable size in a comparable neighborhood, they say. And the impartial appraiser's opinion on what the condemned home was worth, of course, often was disputed by the owner, who felt the appraiser was too low. This led to arguments, lawyers' fees, and more battles that had to be settled in State Supreme Court.
People who had lived at bargain prices in rent‐controlled apartments also found rents generally higher at their new address; and even at increased rents, apartments were extremely scarce if tenants wished to remain in Bay Ridge, which most did.
In an effort to, get more cooperation from landlords in making apartments available to the homeless Bay Ridge people, representatives of the Triborough Bridge and Tunnel Authority, which financed the building of the bridge, paid landlords $150 as a kind of bonus for each apartment rented. The Triborough agents also chauffeured the Bay Ridge people around, showing them one apartment after another, often supplying baby‐sitters as well, and paid all moving expenses (at the rate of $100 a room) as well as redecoration costs if the Bay Ridge people could find an apartment they liked well enough to take.
"We leaned over backwards," said John B. Swift, the Triborough's real estate agent in Brooklyn, "but it was a very difficult time for all of us."
It was perhaps nowhere more difficult than in the case of Mr. and Mrs. John G. Herbert, who lived with 15 of their 17 children in a tattered frame house on the corner of 67th Street and Seventh Avenue. On a Saturday morning in October of 1960, the family, together with two dogs and a cat, began their migration to a house a little more than a mile away.
It took 12 trips back and forth before the job was done, late that night. On the following morning, Mr. Herbert, who works at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, discovered that the cat was missing. He sent two of his sons back to the old house to look for it; they found it hiding under the house.
Now, almost five years later, the Herbert family finds that its three‐story, nine‐room house is two rooms larger but not any more spacious than the old one; if anything, the neighborhood they now have is even more crowded than the older one, and, directly across from their new house live the Espositos, who have 14 children.
The most complicated moving job involved just one person, the former Follies girl, Bessis Gros Dempsey, In latter years she found it difficult to throw anything away, and so her home has long been a kind of museum of period furniture, including her collection of oriental glassware and rugs, and many of her old theater costumes, scrapbooks, and 350 of her hats. Though she moved only four blocks, the moving expenses totaled $450.
Among the minority of Bay Ridge residents who say they are happy that the bridge forced them to move is Mrs. Carroll L. Christiansen. Five years ago she was depressed, but today, having left a small brick house that was jammed in a row of brick houses just like it, she and her husband occupy a suburban home in Tenafly, N. J., that has a quarter‐acre of land.
"It's a lot better than Brooklyn," she said this week. "In Brooklyn the people didn't mix socially—never had too much to do with one another. But here it Is entirely different. I've learned to play golf since coming here, and we play bridge, and go to dances at the country club. My daughter, who Is now 17, felt uprooted for about a year or so; but since then she also made new friends and the whole life is so much easier here."
Yet out of the 7,000 who were forced to move out of their Bay Ridge homes five years ago, about two‐thirds remained in or near Bay Ridge, according to the real estate agent, John B. Swift. The rest went to other parts of New York City, a few elsewhere in New York State, and still fewer out of the state, mostly to Florida.
If there are any conclusions to be drawn from this experi‐ence, other that that he would never do it again, Mr. Swift thinks they are the following:
First, people do not want to move, and will not move unless forced to move.
Second, if they are forced to move, they will not move very far.
A third conclusion, which was not drawn by Mr. Swift but rather from most of those interviewed, is that relocation actually plays little, if any, part in an Individual's social mobility upward or downward (Mrs. Christiansen being an exception); in other words, a person lives pretty much the same way after he moves as he did before he moves.
A relocation plan may promise a "new start" in life, but generally, it seems, the individual sooner or later resorts to the old style.
Where Did the Norwegian Families Go Whe the Vearrazzano Bridge Was Built
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1964/06/19/archives/two-families-displaced-five-years-ago-by-narrows-bridge-assess.html
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