New York

by Edward Rutherfurd

The Molasses Act. It says we may only buy molasses from English traders and English ships.

The last twenty years had seen huge changes in the city: the quieter cable-car lines up Third and Broadway, the recent electrification of the El trains. Why, even the horse-drawn cabs were being replaced with motorized cabs with taxi meters now. Private motor cars, however, were for the rich.

For it was the aftermath of the Triangle fire that most people remembered. It had been a huge scandal when Blanck and Harris, the factory owners, had been taken to court and sued. It had turned out that the exit from the ninth floor, where so many girls had died, had been locked, and the fire precautions totally inadequate. Even after that, it had only been union pressure that had improved the standard of worker safety in the city.

“My point,” he went on, “is that the factory owners were so blinded to their workers’ safety by their pursuit of profit that they actually lost some of their own relations in the fire, and could have perished themselves.”

Verrazano Narrows had been a good choice of title. Not many people remembered that the first European to arrive in New York harbor, way back in the early sixteenth century, had been the Italian Verrazano.

Robert Moses had opposed the name, but the Italians lobbied Governor Nelson Rockefeller, and finally got their way. And it was fitting that the great suspension bridge, joining Staten Island to Brooklyn, should bear an Italian name. For it was one of the most elegant bridges ever built.