All bridges, if they are well built, have their own beauty. They recall the passageway that is perhaps the most enduring symbol of life. They speak of the journey across, and they mark the limits within which we must live. At the same time, they are something given to us by others, on which we cross. For we never cross entirely naked and alone, and we always rest on some base of human ingenuity provided by others.
—Alfred Kazin

Nothing is more sacred or central to the iconography of New York City than its bridges. For countless artists, writers and poets, these enduring structures have provided not only a link from the city to the outside world, but a means by which the great metropolis was introduced. Bridges reflect the spirit of their age; and the bridges of Manhattan reflect the city's pride in itself and its confidence in the future (why else build an edifice like the Brooklyn Bridge?)

This lovely book is a celebration of the city's bridges, their architects and designers, their builders and advocates. Readers will find a dazzling array of prose and poetry, from the classics by Hart Crane and William Carlos Williams, to lesser known, but no less resonant, work.

Bascove's fourteen resplendent paintings form the cornerstone of the book. Their color and form not only show the structures of bones, but also bring the viewer into contact with them. Bascove possesses one great talent: her ability to make the monumental intimate and the intimate monumental. This is not a book of architectural paintings, but a book of art - graced by some of the best writing of the past two centuries.

Bascove studied at the Philadelphia Museum College of Art and has worked with publishers worldwide, providing cover art for such figures as Robertson Davies, T.C. Boyle, and Jerome Charyn. For more than a decade her paintings have been regularly exhibited in London, Paris, and New York. She is the editor and painter behind Stone and Steel: Paintings and Writings Celebrating the Bridges of New York City (Godine, 1998).