A packed city beach on a hot summer day

Call it the other South Beach—not the one in Miami notorious for its topless bathers but the less posh South Beach on the eastern shore of Staten Island, featuring bathers sporting wool suits in this 1920-ish (?) postcard.

Back then, it was a jam-packed resort with hotels, an amusement park, beer gardens, bathing pavillions, and a general Coney Island-like vibe.

A century later, it’s a quieter place renamed Franklin D. Roosevelt Beach with a much thinner crowd and a view of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (not seen here, as it won’t be completed until 1964).

The bridges never built over the Hudson River

Five bridges cross the East River connecting Manhattan to Brooklyn or Queens. Yet there’s only one bridge crossing the Hudson.

More would have been built if certain plans panned out. Like those for a suspension bridge linking 23rd Street to Hoboken.

Designed in 1887 by Gustav Lindenthal, who helped build the Williamsburg, Manhattan, and Queensboro Bridges, it would have been twice as long as the Brooklyn Bridge.

The plans fell apart when funding never materialized.

In the 1920s, Lindenthal had a new idea: a 57th Street Bridge.

This one also died. Instead, a bridge connecting 181st Street to Fort Lee went forward, opening in 1931. (The GWB of course, above and below)

Next up in 1954 was the proposed 125th Street Bridge, a double-deck suspension bridge spanning the Hudson.

That plan was shelved too. The Port Authority had so many projects cooking then, like the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, they lacked the cash.

Things to see and do in New York in 1960

According to a partly shredded Texaco street map of the city, that is.

Sure, most of the streets are the same. But there’s no Soho or Tribeca, and Battery Park City is at least a decade away; West Street is the western border of Manhattan, the map reveals.

Texaco put together a few paragraphs on what do in New York. Some interesting bits:

The map suggests visiting “a great univeristy”—Columbia. NYU was still a middling commuter school at the time.

“Greet airliners at Idlewilde Airport.” Guess President Kennedy is still alive.

“Ferry your car over and tour the farmlands of Staten Island.” No Verrazano-Narrows Bridge yet; that isn’t open until 1964. Farmland?

Taking a drive along The Narrows

Life is good in this circa-1930s postcard depicting The Narrows, the shipping lanes that mark the entrance to New York Harbor.

This must be Bensonhurst—or maybe Bay Ridge? One missing landmark: the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, which won’t be built for another 30 or so years.

The Belt Parkway hugs the shoreline. The back of the postcard calls it “the most scenic motor road in all New York City.”

The Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is turning 45

Best known for its supporting role in Saturday Night Fever, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge has been linking Brooklyn to Staten Island since November 1964. Below, a sketch of the bridge drawn before construction began:

Okay, so it doesn’t have the cache of the George Washington or Brooklyn Bridges. But the Verrazano can hold its own.

Until 1981 it was the world’s longest suspension bridge. One end is at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn, the other at Fort Wadsworth in Staten Island; these two forts are the historic guards of New York Harbor. And after the bridge was built, Staten Island’s population doubled.

Whatever happened to Verrazano Street?

Giovanni da Verrazzano (he spelled it with two z’s) already has a bridge named after him. But a West Village street also was set to take his name in the 1940s—except the city never got around to building it.

 Verrazano Street (with one z, for some reason) would have run from Seventh Avenue South to Sixth Avenue and Houston Street, slicing through bits of Downing, Bedford, and Carmine Streets.

It was supposed to be an entryway to the Lower Manhattan Expressway, a Robert Moses–proposed superhighway that would have connected the Holland Tunnel to The Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges. 

The city was all set to build it; Verrazano Street even made it on to city maps in the ensuing years. But when the Lower Manhattan Expressway met fierce community opposition in the 1960s, the city abandoned the idea . . . and Verrazano Street as well, officially de-mapping it in 1969.