“We all gathered together the week before, and we were talking about the bridge opening the following week,” remembers George Scarpelli. “And Richie Ramaglia said ‘you know somebody from Staten Island should be first.’ And we decided it should be us.”
“My car was the Cadillac convertible; everybody else had a Corvette or small car,” continues Scarpelli in an interview from 2014 posted to youtube. “We decided to get signs painted. The following day, Saturday, we went to Martin’s Paint Store on Hylan Blvd, and my friend Norman who owned the store, gave us all the materials to make signs to put on the side of the car and the back of the car, ‘Staten Island Boys Go to Brooklyn’.”
“And we went down on early Sunday morning — we went down to the bridge and parked in front of the toll booths. The Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority didn’t appreciate us being there. But the borough President Albert Maniscalco talked to us, and convinced the Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority that we should be first, and we had a 6-motorcycle police escort that took us over the bridge.”
“Once we got to Brooklyn,” remembers continues Scarpelli, “people were greeting us and cheering us on. But because of the volume of traffic going to Staten Island, we couldn’t get back on the bridge, so had to get on the 59th Street Ferry and take the ferry back to Staten Island.’
“We paid the first toll. We used a Kennedy Half Dollar, which had just been minted — it came out earlier that year. It was 50 cents at the time. And I’ve been paying ever since.”
Ode to Mandolin Brothers
What is interesting to note is that Stan Jay and Harold “Hap” Kuffner — who created the famous Mandolin Brothers guitar shop on Staten Island — used to talk of their time spent playing the guitar in their cars waiting for the Staten Island Ferry or Brooklyn Ferry. Back before the Verrazano Bridge was built, the ferries were the only way off/on Staten Island to Manhattan or Brooklyn — besides going thru New Jersey (Bayonne Bridge, Goethals Bridge, or Outerbridge Crossing) — so a lot of Staten Islanders spent a lot of time on line in their car waiting for the ferries.
Full Interview with George Scarpelli
The full interview with George Scarpelli from 2014 is here:
Original SI Advance Article of Verrazano Bridge Opening
The Staten Island Advance has published a digitized version of the original article they did to cover the Verrazano Bridge’s opening — it is here:
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