Take Barry Feinstein, New York Union Boss Toppled by Corruption, who just passed away at 87. The name rang a bit of a bell; NYC municipal workers head from the heyday of the '60s and '70s, whose name was always in the paper threatening to pull some group of workers off the job, unless...
Mr. Feinstein gets the Robert McFadden treatment, so the obit is filled with NYC events and pictures of people I remember, following of course the great McFadden lede.
Early on in Mr. Feinstein's rise to more power, McFadden tells us:
"It was a relatively small base for an ambitious labor leader. Out of a municipal work force of of about 200,000 he represented 20,000 Housing Authority and hospital workers, school guards and bridge tenders."
Bridge tenders. Trigger. Did this guy have something to do with the bridge tenders going out on strike decades ago? You bet.
New York City is surrounded by a vast waterway that most people are unaware of. If you only think of New York City as Manhattan, then the only water you're aware of is that which surrounds Manhattan, an Island; the East River, the Hudson River and the Harlem River.
Right now the Department of Transportation website identifies 24 "movable bridges" over New York City waterways. There are many classifications of these bridges, but Federal regulations require they be constantly attended. By whom? Why bridge tenders, of course.
At the time of Mr. Feinstein leadership of these bridge tenders there were 26 movable city bridges. There are now 24. There is no longer a drawbridge (bascule bridge) on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn over Mill Basin. That was once stuck in the open position one Father's Day and caused a monumental tie-up.
Likewise, there is no longer a drawbridge over the Flushing River on Northern Boulevard just east of Main Street on the way to then Shea Stadium, now Citifield. New construction of these overpasses eliminated the drawbridges.
There are no less than eight movable bridges over the Harlem River connecting the Bronx to Manhattan, which is why I always get a kick out of the NYT describe any borough other than Manhattan as an "outer borough."
The Department of Transportation identifies the movable bridges as: retractile, swing, draw, and lift. There are 11 drawbridges. The bridge pictured above is the Pelham Bay bridge over the Hutchinson River, or Eastchester Creek at that point. There are a lot of movable bridges over the Gowanus Canal and Newton Creek, waterways between Brooklyn and Queens, which is why so few people are aware of them.
So, imagine this. Those movable bridges are left in open positions, making roadway travel over them impossible until they're swing back in place, or are dropped back in position.
Well, Barry thought about that when he pulled the bridge tenders off the job in 1971, who as they left their posts, left the bridges in open positions and took with them the special tool used to work the gears, the only key so to speak.. The bridges were left in a state of perpetual priapism.
The Army Corps of Engineers has jurisdiction over the waterways. But, alas and alack, they didn't have the special tool to bring the bridges back to their closed state. Traffic? Fuhgeddaboudit! Twenty-four hour gridlock. And no work-around without the special tool.
As I encountered the news that Mr. Feinstein had bridge tenders under his leadership, I immediately thought of all those open bridges, and particularly the one I could see from the Flushing line, No. 7 train that I relied on to go to and from work every day.
The Flushing drawbridge spans what I'll call the Flushing Creek, but I've seen more recent maps that call it a river. It's a body of water, that is so sulphureous and polluted that I've never seen any maritime traffic on it. Maybe barges for the sand and gravel outfits on the bank.
I'm not sure you couldn't walk across it, because it is not really liquid. If you stepped in it you'd leave footprints. The LIRR Port Washington line crosses the creek just west of the Main Street stop. If you're paying attention and it's low tide, there are the remains of some kind of rowboat that has been decaying in the water since at least the 1950s. It is almost completely rotted away now, but if you look hard enough you can still see a small portion pointing up through the gelatin waterway.
Reading the obituary about the bridge tenders strike, Mr. McFadden tells us it lasted two days. I thought it lasted longer, but the image of the open Flushing drawbridge always stayed with me since I doubt there was ever a need to open it for maritime traffic to pass underneath.
What I didn't remember as I read the obituary is that at the same time as the yanking of the bridge tenders off the job, the sewage treatment plants were shut down and a billion gallons of raw sewage was dumped into the city's waterways.
Mr. Feinstein had gotten everyone's attention.
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