Main span: 4,260 ft (1,298 m)
Brooklyn to Staten Island

When the Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened in 1964 it was (like the Brooklyn, Williamsburg, and George Washington bridges before it) the longest suspension bridge in the world.

The numbers involved are staggering: each of the 693–foot towers contains three million rivets and more than one million bolts. The towers are so far apart and so tall that the curvature of the earth had to be taken into account when they were built, which means that the towers lean away from each other and are measurably further apart at the top than the base. The roadway itself hangs twelve feet lower in the summer than in the winter, due to thermal expansion of the steel suspension cables in hot weather.

The bridge was designed by Othmar Amman, and is named for Giovanni da Verrazano, who in 1524 was the first European to sail into the New York Harbor. The heavy–handed Robert Moses oversaw the project, and more than 8,000 residents of Bay Ridge were uprooted from their homes and neighborhoods in order to provide space for the access ramps. The bridge is well-used and well-loved today, and is closed down each year for the New York City Marathon.