Let’s say it’s a recent afternoon, with the sky as blue as a paint sample. Forget the sky, though. You’re in the Bronx, in a trailer beside the Harlem River, off 173rd Street, with several city officials and consultants who are about to tour the interior of the High Bridge, the steel-and-stone footbridge that connects the Bronx and Manhattan and is the city’s oldest bridge. The High Bridge closed sometime in the early nineteen-seventies. (Nobody is sure exactly when.) Sixty-one million dollars is being spent to restore it, and it opens next year. The restoration is described as a rehabilitation, as if it were a question of the bridge’s character. This may have to do with the High Bridge’s having a shadowy past. A lot of people believe that the bridge was closed after some kids dropped something from it that killed a passenger on the Circle Line. What happened is that, in the fifties, some kids dropped some things from it that struck four passengers on the Circle Line, and two of them needed stitches.
The High Bridge encloses a disused water pipe, which is seven feet tall, part of the original aqueduct. Before you can see it, however, you have to take an hour-long course in Confined Space Entry, which is why you’re in the trailer. The course is taught by Michael Byrnes, a small, cheerful guy with a husky voice, who is a certified industrial hygienist—someone, that is, who’s responsible for the well-being of workers on a site. Byrnes is showing slides, the most arresting of which has a skeleton in a doorway, along with a sentence saying that, of the two hundred and thirty-four people killed in confined spaces between 1993 and 1996, “up to half . . . were rescuers.” Byrnes says that work in such places, which might have “entrapment hazards,” is meant to be done quickly. “You get in and out,” he says. “The organization is not going to set up a desk for you.” What else you learn: I.D.L.H. means “immediately dangerous to life and health,” and usually denotes gases. No gas exists in the High Bridge, though. “For this project, the hazards would be more physical,” Byrnes says. “Striking your head when you go in there. Things lying around you might step on.”
After the class, park by the bridge and join everyone at the entrance, a huge steel gate, painted black, with razor wire around the edges like lace. The manhole leading to the interior is several hundred feet down the walkway. Notice the pleasing herringbone pattern of the bricks. The darker bricks, the ones that are almost black, are from the nineteenth century—the bridge, which is twelve hundred feet long and a hundred and sixteen feet tall, opened in 1848. Some of the bridge’s bricks are stamped “RBC,” for Rockland Brick Company, and were made from clay dug along the Hudson River in Haverstraw, New York.
Beside the manhole, you’ll be issued some P.P.E.—personal-protection equipment, meaning a hard hat and maybe an orange vest—and offered blue plastic gloves, because, Carlos Herrera, the site’s safety manager, will say, “it’s dirty down there.” The cleaning of the interior, using shovels and Hepa vacuums—shop vacuums with special dust filters—started in February and has just been completed. “In the beginning, it was difficult to breathe, because it was wet, humid, no ventilation,” Burhan Zayed, the engineer who oversaw this stage of the project, will say. Afterward, all the steel and brick and rubble were separated and piled against the walls. “For the archeologists,” Zayed will say. “To tell us whether it’s historical or not.”
The interior, which is a long tunnel, is lit by a string of overhead lights, as if at a party. The illumination is murky, and the dampness gives it a pearly quality. Stick with someone who has a flashlight, and stay away from the periodic holes in the floor that have been covered with plywood; they are nearly a hundred feet deep. Follow the rusty aqueduct pipe back to the Bronx end of the bridge, where “760” is written on the wall in blue paint. “That’s seven hundred and sixty feet from the entrance,” Zayed says. “I used to count it every day.”
Return to the manhole, climb the ladder, and hand in your P.P.E. A couple of blocks from the bridge, you’ll encounter a tall guy, with tight jeans, a T-shirt, and tattoos like bruises. He’ll be pacing and waving one of his hands. “I supply everybody with energy,” he’ll say into a phone. “That’s what it is.” Give him a wide berth. ♦