Nov. 21, 1964 - The sun shone, the sky was cloudless, bands played, cannons echoed up and down the harbor, flags waved, and thousands of motorists yesterday became part of the first traffic jam on the Verrazano‐Narrows Bridge.
The bridge, which took more than five years to build and which reaches like a rainbow over the Narrows between Brooklyn and Staten Island, was officially opened to traffic at 3 p.m.
“This latest addition to our city’s great wealth of bridges represents a new summit of achievement,” New York Mayor Robert Wagner told the crowd assembled near the world's longest suspended span. “Surely we must see it not only as the biggest, but as the most beautiful of all, the most princely, and the most stately.”
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