Ben Nadeff-Haffrey
speaker
1,009 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Ben Nadeff-Haffrey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
There were a series of attempts to fix that problem, to make this distant place feel like it was part of the city, but they all failed.
There was the train tunnel to Staten Island, which the city even broke ground on and then never finished.
The bridge was the last gambit.
The writer Gay Talese wrote his first book about the building of that bridge.
He wrote, the bridge had become the symbol of hope.
This bridge was a big deal.
And for the rest of New York, it was like it had opened up a portal to a whole new world.
Here's a newsreel from 1964, when the bridge first opened.
Everything on the island is pre- or post-bridge.
Pre-bridge, it was a kind of paradise.
Bucolic farmland, rolling hills, shoals of oysters rimming the island.
Post-bridge, it was all ticky-tack suburban houses, white people fleeing the increasingly black and brown Brooklyn, and of course, the ever-expanding mountains of trash.
To be from Staten Island is to have this sense that something grand has been buried under garbage and forgotten.
And so here we are.
Let's look at that, because one person, one vote makes sense.
Yeah.
But then what is that missing, that ruling?
In the New York Times, at the height of secession, one Staten Islander said the first thing an independent Staten Island should do is, quote, tear down the Verrazano Narrows Bridge and let us go back to life the way it used to be.
Talking to Scamardella, I felt like that was a big piece of it for him.
How would you convince people?
Showing 941–960 of 1,009 · page 48 of 51
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