Anonymous Steel, Visible Skin

We met in a diner on Flatbush Avenue, which was Talese’s idea. He’d said on the phone that you couldn’t discuss infrastructure from the thirty-seventh floor of something, that you needed to be at street level where you could feel the subway through the floor. The diner was called Olympic, and it had that quality common to Greek diners in Brooklyn where the menu is forty pages and everything arrives at the same temperature. Talese was already in a booth by the window, wearing a suit that cost more than my rent, studying the traffic on the avenue with the patient scrutiny of a man who once spent three years writing about a bridge.

Coates arrived late, didn’t apologize for it, and ordered coffee before sitting down. He slid into the booth and looked at Talese with an expression I’d describe as wary respect — the way you’d look at someone whose work you’d internalized but whose assumptions you’d spent your career dismantling.

“Gay tells me you want to write about public works,” Coates said to me.

I said yes. A travel essay, but the travel is vertical rather than horizontal. Not across the country but down through the strata of a single city — its bridges, its tunnels, its water system, its subway — and the question is who built it and what the building cost and whose bodies were spent in the construction and how the city has metabolized that labor into something invisible.

Talese straightened a napkin. “When I wrote about the Verrazano, I followed the ironworkers. Mohawk men, mostly. Newfoundlanders. They came from these specific places and they built this enormous thing and then they disappeared back into their lives. Nobody in the city looked at the bridge and thought about them. The bridge was just the bridge.”

“That’s the problem,” Coates said. “Not that nobody thought about them. That the not-thinking is the design. The bridge works because you don’t see the labor. Infrastructure is successful precisely to the degree that it’s invisible. But invisible to whom? Because the guys who built it — they don’t forget. Their bodies don’t forget.”

“I know that,” Talese said, and there was an edge to it. “I wrote a whole book about that.”

“You wrote about anonymity,” Coates said. “I’m talking about something different. I’m talking about erasure. There’s a difference between a worker whose name nobody knows and a worker whose existence is denied. The Mohawk ironworkers — you told their story. You named them. But there are layers beneath that story that you didn’t get to, or didn’t think to get to, and I don’t mean that as an attack, I mean there are always layers.”

Talese took a slow drink of water. He does things slowly, I was learning — the deliberate pacing of a man who spent a decade writing a book about the New York Times. “What layers.”

“The sandhogs who dug the subway tunnels. How many of them were Black? How many were immigrants from the Caribbean, from the South, from places where the only work available was the work that would shorten your life? And when we ride the subway now — when a million people a day pass through those tunnels — do they understand that the tunnels were dug by hand, by men who breathed compressed air and developed caisson disease and died young, and that a disproportionate number of those men were not white?”

“I don’t know the demographics of the sandhogs in 1904,” Talese said.

“Neither do I, exactly. That’s the point. The records are incomplete. They’re incomplete in a particular direction — the direction that makes certain bodies disappear. The city has records of every rivet in the Brooklyn Bridge and very poor records of who placed them.”

I said: So the essay is about that gap. The documentary record of the infrastructure — the blueprints, the engineering reports, the tonnage of steel — versus the documentary void where the workers should be.

“That’s half of it,” Coates said. He was turning his coffee cup in slow quarter-rotations on the saucer. “The other half is what happens after. Who gets to use the thing that was built. Robert Moses built highways through Black neighborhoods. The Cross-Bronx Expressway destroyed whole communities. The highways didn’t just displace people — they were instruments of displacement. They were drawn on maps with the specific knowledge that these particular people would lose their homes. That’s not a side effect. That’s a function.”

“Moses is an easy villain,” Talese said.

“He’s not a villain at all. He’s a bureaucrat who understood that infrastructure is power and wielded it accordingly. I don’t need him to be a villain. I need the reader to understand that a bridge is not neutral. A highway is not neutral. A subway line is a statement about who matters enough to connect.”

Talese leaned back. The diner was filling up — lunch rush, a line forming at the register, the particular kinetic density of Brooklyn at noon that makes you understand why people both love and want to escape this city. “I’ve always been interested in the men who do the work,” he said. “The bricklayers, the steelworkers, the guys on the high iron. My father was a tailor. He worked with his hands. I understand hands. I understand what it means to make something that outlasts you and to receive no recognition for it. That’s what drew me to the bridge builders — not the engineering, not the politics, but the fact of a man a thousand feet in the air with no net, earning his living.”

“I know,” Coates said. “And that matters. I grew up around men whose labor was similar — not the height, but the vulnerability. My father worked at Howard’s press, typesetting, and before that he did whatever was available. When I think about labor, I think about it inside a body that is already marked. A Black body doing construction work in America isn’t just a body doing work. It’s a body that has been, historically, instrumentalized as work. The labor isn’t separate from the history. You can’t write about a Black man digging a tunnel without writing about the fact that his great-grandfather may have been forced to dig, and that the distinction between chosen labor and coerced labor is not as bright a line as we’d prefer.”

There was a long silence. The waitress refilled Coates’s coffee without being asked. Talese folded his napkin into a smaller square.

“That’s a heavy thing to put on the man in the tunnel,” Talese said, finally.

“I’m not putting it on him. I’m saying it’s already there. He carries it. Every Black man who picks up a shovel in this country carries it. The question is whether the writer is honest enough to acknowledge it or whether we write the John Henry story again — the noble laborer, the strong back, the tragic sacrifice — and let the reader feel something warm and sad and go home unchanged.”

“I never wrote the John Henry story,” Talese said, and there was real heat in it now. “I wrote about men sitting on a steel beam eating lunch. I wrote about their wives in Bay Ridge wondering if they’d come home. I wrote about the specific weight of a rivet and the specific sound it makes when it’s thrown. I’m not sentimental about labor. I’m precise about it.”

“You’re precise about the labor. I’m asking you to be precise about the body performing it.”

I was quiet during this exchange because they needed the room, and because I was afraid to say the wrong thing. But I had a question, and I asked it: Is the essay about a specific city?

Both of them looked at me like I’d asked whether water was wet.

“New York,” Talese said. “Obviously.”

Coates nodded. “It has to be New York. Not because it’s exceptional but because it’s legible. Everyone knows the subway. Everyone knows the bridges. You can write about the Brooklyn Bridge and not need a paragraph of exposition. The infrastructure is famous. The labor is not. That’s your gap.”

“But I want the narrator to travel through it,” I said. “Not describe it from a desk. Walk across the bridges. Ride every subway line. Visit the water tunnels. Go to the archives. Find the neighborhoods that were destroyed to build the things we celebrate.”

“The travel is the structure,” Coates said. “I understand that. But be careful. There’s a version of this that becomes a white person’s odyssey of racial discovery — ‘I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge and I realized, oh my God, Black people built things.’ That’s obscene.”

“Who says the narrator is white?” Talese asked.

Coates looked at him. “Who’s writing it?”

He meant me. I told him I understood the problem. That the narrator’s position is part of the argument — that who travels through the infrastructure determines what they see, what they’re capable of seeing, and what the city allows them to see.

“The city doesn’t allow anything,” Talese said. “The city is indifferent. That’s what makes it bearable and also what makes it brutal. New York doesn’t care who you are. It will let you look at the bridge or it will let you die under the bridge, with equal disinterest.”

“That’s the myth,” Coates said. “New York is indifferent. The great democratic city. Everybody gets treated the same. It’s not true. It has never been true. The city cares enormously about who you are — it just expresses that caring through infrastructure rather than through speech. The subway doesn’t go everywhere equally. The bridges don’t connect everyone equally. The water pressure in Brownsville is not the water pressure in Park Slope. The city speaks through its pipes and its tunnels and its roads, and what it says is: these people count, and these people do not.”

Talese was quiet for a while. He ate a forkful of something — eggs, I think — with the concentration of a man who takes every form of craftsmanship seriously, including short-order cooking. “You’re right about the infrastructure. You may be wrong about the indifference. It’s not a myth. It’s a condition. The indifference and the discrimination operate simultaneously, which is what makes the city psychologically unbearable for anyone paying attention. You’re being sorted and ignored at the same time.”

I hadn’t expected this from him — the concession delivered as an escalation. He wasn’t backing down. He was absorbing Coates’s point and turning it into something harder.

Coates set his cup down. “Sorted and ignored. That’s good. That’s worth following.”

I asked what the essay’s movement looks like. Not the plot — I didn’t say plot — but the physical movement. Where does the narrator go?

“Start underground,” Talese said. “Start in the tunnel. Start with the thing nobody sees.”

“And surface gradually,” Coates said. “Tunnels first. Subway. Then the bridges. Then — I don’t know. Something above the bridges. The water towers on the rooftops. Something that takes you higher each section, each layer of infrastructure lifting you further from the ground where the workers stood.”

“That’s too neat,” I said. I surprised myself saying it. “That’s an arc. Up from the underground, into the light. It’s a redemption structure.”

Coates looked at me with something that might have been approval. “Fine. Then break it. Go underground, come up, go back underground. The narrator tries to surface and the city pulls them back down. Because the buried story doesn’t stay buried just because you’ve moved to the next bridge.”

Talese was nodding. “The Verrazano was built from both shores simultaneously. Two teams working toward each other. When the roadway met in the middle, the gap was something like — I’d have to check — fractions of an inch. After years of work, from opposite directions, the alignment was nearly perfect. But ‘nearly’ is the word. There’s always a gap. You close it with expansion joints. You build the tolerance for imperfection into the structure.”

“That sounds like a metaphor,” Coates said. “Are you offering a metaphor?”

“I don’t do metaphors. I’m telling you about a bridge.”

I laughed. Coates did not, but his expression softened in a way that told me he appreciated the correction, or at least the specificity of the deflection. These two men are not alike in most ways — temperament, background, prose style, what keeps them up at night — but they share a commitment to the concrete detail that borders on moral conviction. For Talese it’s the width of a lapel, the angle of a riveter’s arm, the specific shade of gray on the Verrazano at dusk. For Coates it’s the body — what it weighs, what it can absorb, what the state has done to it and called civilization.

“Here’s what I keep getting stuck on,” I said. “The essay has to hold two things at once. It has to honor the labor — the craft, the risk, the sheer physical achievement of building a subway system or a suspension bridge. And it has to indict the system that consumed that labor and erased the laborers. But those two things pull against each other. If I honor the work too much, I’m aestheticizing exploitation. If I indict the system too hard, I’m diminishing the workers’ agency and skill.”

“Yes,” Coates said. “That’s the problem. Don’t solve it.”

Talese pushed his plate aside. “The men I knew on the bridge — they weren’t thinking about exploitation. They were thinking about the rivet. The beam. Whether the wind was going to pick up before they finished the shift. You can write about systemic injustice and you should, but if you lose the rivet, you’ve lost the man.”

“The man didn’t exist outside the system,” Coates said.

“The man existed on the beam. In the wind. With the rivet gun. For those hours, that was his world.”

“His world was constructed by forces he didn’t choose and couldn’t escape.”

“And inside those forces, he was extraordinarily skilled, and brave, and precise, and real.”

This went on. I don’t mean they repeated themselves — they didn’t. Each exchange narrowed and sharpened. Talese kept returning to the particular, the physical, the sensory: the smell of hot steel, the sound of traffic on the deck a hundred feet below, the way a riveter’s hands looked after thirty years. Coates kept widening the frame: whose hands, shaped by what history, building what, for whom, and at what cost beyond the hourly wage.

I asked whether the narrator should visit the sites of displacement. The neighborhoods Moses destroyed. The communities that were severed by highways.

“Visit,” Coates said. “What does visit mean? You show up in the Bronx and look at where the Cross-Bronx Expressway cut through? The people who lived there are gone or dead. You’d be visiting an absence. That’s tourism.”

“Tourism of absence is what most travel writing is,” I said.

Coates sat with that. “Maybe. But there’s a difference between arriving at a ruin and arriving at a wound. A ruin is finished. A wound is ongoing. The Bronx is not a ruin. People live there. They live in the aftermath of the highway, not in its ruins. The aftermath is their present. If you show up with a notebook looking for evidence of historical trauma, you’re going to miss the fact that someone is trying to get to work.”

“But the getting to work is shaped by the highway,” I said. “The commute is the aftermath.”

“Now you’re doing my job,” Coates said. “Which is fine, but do it with specificity. Not ‘the commute is shaped by history.’ Which commute. Which bus. Which stop that was eliminated in the 2010 service cuts and never restored.”

Talese had been writing something on a napkin. He looked up. “You know, when I was reporting on the bridge, I followed a man named Benny — an ironworker from Newfoundland. I followed him for months. He had a routine: ferry to the site, climb to the deck, work the shift, ferry back, drink at a bar in Bay Ridge, send money home. His life was structured entirely by the bridge. When the bridge was finished, his life lost its structure. He went back to Newfoundland and I don’t know what happened to him.”

“That’s the story you told,” Coates said. “What’s the story you didn’t tell? Were there Black ironworkers on the Verrazano?”

Talese was still for a moment. “There were. Not many. I didn’t focus on them.”

“Why not?”

“Because I was following the Mohawk crews and the Newfoundlanders. That was my access. That was my thread.”

“And the Black workers weren’t your thread.”

“They weren’t in the crews I embedded with. It wasn’t — ” He stopped. Restarted. “It was a choice I made about scope. I’d make a different choice now. Maybe.”

The “maybe” sat between them like an undetonated thing. Coates didn’t push on it. I noticed that — the restraint, or perhaps the calculation that the concession was more useful intact than shattered by further questioning. Talese had said something honest, and honesty in that register is fragile. You either let it stand or you