Workers and Laborers

Workers and Laborers. Anonymous Laborers Build the Bridge from the Ground Up. , Hundreds of steelworkers, "sandhogs" and laborers constructed the bridge. The workers who manufactured, shipped, and assembled the materials bridge the Industrial Revolution and the new technologies of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the construction of the Bayonne Bridge helped soften the early of the Great Depression bye employing hundreds of workers., Engineering the Design , Once Othmar Ammann's bridge design was approved, his six assistant engineers (employees of The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey) designed its individual components and determined how they would be assembled. The work involved complex calculations of tension and compression; easily determined today with computers., Pennsylvania Steel , The steel components forming the Arch were produced by the American Bridge Company in its company town of Ambridge, Pennsylvania At that time, steel was produced using the "open hearth" method. Pig iron was brought from blast furnaces and inserted into an "open hearth" furnace. The temperature was raised to 2,000 degrees, melting the metals and causing impurities to separate. The impurities were removed, and materials were added to the molten metal to produce specific types of steel needed for a project. The Bayonne Bridge was the first major bridge to use manganese steel for its main arch structural members and rivets., Building the Bridge , Constructing the bridge was labor intensive and dangerous. Workers operated machinery to excavate the soil down to the bedrock in preparation for the Arch shoes and the approach supports., The support column forms were assembled using three million pounds of steel in which nearly 28,000 cubic yards of concrete was poured. The arch assembly involved workers selecting the appropriate pre-cast steel components that had been shipped by rail to Kearney, New Jersey, and loaded onto barges that brought them to the construction site. The "traveler," a moveable Crane atop the bridge, raised the components, and workers attached them to form the arch., Lost and Remembered , The bridge was built during the Great Depression, a relief to the hundreds of workers and their families who may have otherwise been out of work. Construction unfortunately claimed the lives of four workers: Luh Kraya, George Slacks, Edward Barnhart, and Joseph Malinowski.,

"…you must share these plaudits with an army of workmen, who, stone by stone and rivet by rivet, reared this edifice to its magnificent maturity. The workmen who built this bridge were the soldiers of peacetime. Not in gold braid nor khaki did they march under your orders, but in grease-stained overalls. There was no music to attend them. There were no medals to reward them. Four of them made the supreme sacrifice." , - Hon. Lucius F. Donohue, Mayor of the City of Bayonne (1931).