It began with underwater investigations and soil studies and survey sheets; and when the noise finally started, on January 16, 1959, nobody in Brooklyn or Staten Island heard it. It started with the sound of a steam pile driver ramming a pipe thirty-six inches in diameter into the silt of a small island off the Brooklyn shore. The island held an old battered bastion called Fort Lafayette, which had been a prison during the Civil War, but now it was about to be demolished, and the island would only serve as a base for one of the bridge's two gigantic towers. Nobody heard the first sounds of the bridge because they were soft and because the island was six hundred feet off the Brooklyn shore; but even if it had been closer, the sounds would not have risen above the rancor and clamor of the people, for when the drilling began, the people still were protesting, still were hopeful that the bridge would never be built. They were aware that the city had not yet formally condemned their property—but that came three months later.
