suspension bridge spanning New York Harbor from Brooklyn to Staten Island, built by Othmar H. Ammann from 1959 to 1964. Its 4,260-foot (1,298-metre) main span was, until the completion of the Humber Bridge in 1981, the longest in the world. The double-decked, six-lane-wide roadway, 228 ft above mean high water at midpoint, is supported by four cables hung from towers 690 ft high. The cables themselves weigh nearly 10,000 tons each; the roadway 60,000 tons. An exceptionally expensive engineering project largely because of the problem of land acquisition, its total cost was $325,000,000.