Worldwide recognition allows that the George Washington Bridge is an outstanding symbol of the City of New York. It is one of the Seven Engineering Wonders of Gotham, just as San Francisco boasts the Golden Gate Bridge; Australia, its Sydney Harbour Bridge; and London, its Tower Bridge.

With the tragic demise of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, “the George” as it is affectionately called by the Port Authority of NY & NJ (its custodian, its caretaker, and its comptroller) is a civil engineering marvel in itself. The Gateway to New York, it is the first thing you enter and cross when you finish your trip from everywhere west of the Hudson River. It is also an aesthetic structure of distinguished beauty.

The Bridge is the creation and design of Othmar H. Ammann, P.E., Hon. M., ASCE., while he was Chief Engineer of the Port Authority. He was one of the world's foremost bridge designers. Groundbreaking occurred 21 September, 1927, in the Jazz Age before Hoover's Depression. Construction continued uninterrupted through the Depression. McClintic-Marshall erected the steel towers and fl oor systems before, during, and after John A. Roebling's Sons Company, in complete concert, built the anchorages, spun the cables, and hung the suspenders. It is 4760 feet long between anchorages, and cost $59,000,000 by the time it was opened to traffic 25 October, 1931.

The Great Depression had little effect on the steel, cable, and roadway construction, but it brought about a profound effect on its finished persona, and on the worldwide fashion of major suspension bridges. O.H. Ammann's original design called for both towers to be clad in Vermont granite to give the appearance of being a stone masonry structure, as is the Brooklyn Bridge. Although the stone facing had already been quarried and cut, there were absolutely no funds to pay the massive cost of transporting them to the site. Thus the Port Authority chose to leave both handsome steel towers stand naked. They appeared so triumphantly dominant in their beauty and simplicity of design, they began a universal fashion for suspension bridges, followed by San Francisco's two great exposed steel bridges, and O.H. Ammann's Verrazano-Narrows and Throgs Neck crossings in New York.

When I was a small boy, often I'd sit watching the cable spinning for hours on a hillside in Riverside Drive Park, near where the Columbia Medical Center Nurse's Residence now stands. It was then I abandoned the desire to be a fireman or a train driver in favor of aspiring to civil engineering.

About a dozen years before the second (lower) deck (added in the place originally designed for it) was opened, 29 August, 1962, I sketched the Bridge from near the place where I watched the "spider" spinning the cables. The sketch shows the George Washington Bridge in its daytime glory. After dark, welcoming travelers to New York City, it hangs like a string of jewels in the night.

M.D. Morris P.E., was past President of the Metropolitan and Ithaca Sections, and National Chairman of the Construction Division. In 2001 he received the Peurifoy Construction Research Award.