NEW YORK — It’s an error that has loomed over New York Harbor for more than 50 years: The name of the majestic Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is spelled wrong.
Despite a new petition drive to make it right — the bridge is named for 16th-century Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano (two Zs) — the state authority that controls the span has stubbornly held to the one Z position it’s taken for years: We know it’s wrong, but we’re not changing it.
Metropolitan Transportation Authority officials say it would simply be too expensive to change all the signs, brochures, maps and websites. Changing the name of New York’s Triborough Bridge to the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge in 2008, for example, reportedly cost the state $4 million.
“This is a travesty,” said Robert Nash, a 21-year-old Brooklyn college student who started an online petition to add the other Z to North America’s longest suspension bridge. “To honor a man and name a bridge after him and not spell his name right?”
So why push for the name change now? Nash, whose petition was first reported by the Brooklyn Paper and its Brooklyn Daily website, says it came to him by chance as he was taking pictures of the bridge with his girlfriend. He noticed a sign with the name and it just looked wrong. His suspicions were confirmed when he checked Italian websites for the explorer’s name, “and I said, ‘Wow!’”
Exactly how the error was made in the first place is unclear.