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Let's say it's a recent afternoon, with the sky as blue as a paint sample. Forget the sky, though. You're in the Bronx, in a trailer beside the Harlem River, off 173rd Street, with several city officials and consultants who are about to tour the interior of the High Bridge, the steel-and-stone footbridge that connects the Bronx and Manhattan and is the city's oldest bridge. The High Bridge closed sometime in the early nineteen-seventies. (Nobody is sure exactly when.) Sixty-one million dollars is being spent to restore it, and it opens next year. The restoration is described as a rehabilitation, as if it were a question of the bridge's character. This may have to do with the High Bridge's having a shadowy past. A lot of people believe that the bridge was closed after some kids dropped something from it that killed a passenger on the Circle Line. What happened is that, in the fifties, some kids dropped some things from it that struck four passengers on the Circle Line, and two of them needed stitches.
The High Bridge encloses a disused water pipe, which is seven feet tall, part of the original aqueduct....