Swiss American Historical Society Review
Keywords
Six Bridges, Othmar Ammann, New Haven, Swiss Immigrants, Swiss Engineering
Abstract
Around his eightieth birthday, the Swiss-American engineer, Othmar Ammann moved to an apartment at the top of the Carlyle Hotel in Manhattan. One imagines that he, gazing down on the city below, could have only marveled at how much its landscape had changed since his arrival there fiftyodd years earlier. He also could have delighted in his own accomplishments, the vistas from his new home offering visual confirmation of his professional successes. With views in three directions, Ammann would have seen virtually all of "his bridges": the George Washington to the north; the Triborough, Bronx-Whitestone, and Throgs Neck to the east; and the Bayonne and Verrazano-Narrows to, respectively, the southwest and south. Darl Rastorfer's Six Bridges is a chronicle of these monuments in steel and concrete, a tribute to the man who engineered much of New York city's infrastructure in the first half of the twentieth century.
Recommended Citation
Butz, Nicole
(2001)
"Book Review: Six Bridges: the Legacy of Othmar Ammann,"
Swiss American Historical Society Review: Vol. 37:
No.
1, Article 5.
Available at:
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/sahs_review/vol37/iss1/5