Soft waves crashed on the rocks of Shore Park and Parkway in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, as then-21-year-old Robert Nash took a walk there in June of 2016. He was with his now-wife Enza Nash, who was his girlfriend at the time, admiring the view of the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. 

The Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge has a central span of 4,260 feet.

The third-generation Italian-American pulled out his phone out of curiosity to search for the history of the bridge. 

“Immediately it stuck out to me,” he said. “The bridge was not spelled in the likeness as the explorer it was supposed to be honoring.”

The bridge, which connects Brooklyn and Staten Island, was named after Italian explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, the first documented European sailor to enter New York Harbor. 

“Being that we’re from this area, he’s quite possibly the most important Italian of that era to all of us,” said Nash, who was born in Dyker Heights, Brooklyn, two blocks away from where his wife grew up. 

The original 1959 construction contract misspelled Verrazzano’s name using one ‘z’, creating an error that lasted for over 50 years. 

This realization caused Nash to begin an online petition in 2016 to add the other ‘z’ to North America’s longest suspension bridge. 

“It was a no-brainer,” he said. “No self-acclaimed proud Italian-American could argue with me, and any lover of history and the English language wouldn’t want to continue with a spelling error.”

He said it naturally attracted attention, even from Italian-American celebrities. These included restaurateur Tony Gemignani from Food Network and Italian model and actress Eleonora Pieroni who lives in New York, according to Nash. 

However, Nash said he gathered most of the signatures in person in the “traditional” way. He said he passed around the petition and communicated with people about the issue on the street. 

He said he ultimately gathered over 10,000 signatures.

“I kept hearing a lot of doubts from acquaintances,” he said. “Only my immediate family and my wife’s family really truly believed I was going to find a way to make it happen.”

And he did. The petition caught the eyes of New York State Senators Martin Golden and Andrew Lanza a few months later. They sent a letter to MTA Chairman Thomas Prendergast on Dec. 7, 2016, citing the nearly 1,000 petition signatures at the time.  

Golden and his staffers contacted Nash and met with him multiple times. At these meetings, they discussed the importance of the correction and what they could do to help. 

Golden and Lanza then sponsored a New York State Senate bill based on Nash’s petition in 2018, which was passed unanimously. 

After the New York State Assembly passed the bill, former Governor Andrew Cuomo signed it into law in 2018. 

“We are correcting this decades-old misspelling out of respect to the legacy of the explorer and to New York’s heritage,” Cuomo said in a statement. 

The bridge is pictured here from the view of the Fourth Avenue and Shore Road entrance to Shore Park and Parkway.

For now-26-year-old Nash, the petition was rooted in how he values his Italian heritage and culture. 

His great-grandparents, who hailed from the Italian provinces of ​​Naples, Salerno, Caserta and Sicily, “instilled in their children and grandchildren that they came from a beautiful country called Italy,” he said.

Family also inspired his fighting and persistence. He grew up hearing “story after story” about his union shop steward father, Robert Anthony Nash, Sr., fighting for his fellow workers. 

“He wouldn’t stop until his men got what they deserved,” he said. “That fight is also in me. Don’t stop pushing if it’s something you believe in or something you know is right.”

Nash’s grandfather, Robert Joseph Nash, was also an ironworker who built the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge. He also worked on the original World Trade Center.

Eventually, his son worked on “Ground Zero,” originally a recovery effort looking for 9/11 survivors. The family’s history in the trade drove Nash’s interest in being an ironworker.

When he graduated from St. Francis College in 2017 with an accounting major and an economics minor, he already had interned for major U.S. accounting firm Grant Thornton. It was then that he began to “realize the office world may not be for [him],” he said. 

He spent a year post-graduation working for a foreign bank’s sanctions department. After watching someone who had worked there for 30 years be replaced by someone half his age and salary, Nash said he didn’t want that to be him.

Growing up in a union household, he heard stories of how his father’s co-workers were also his friends. This contrasted with the harsh nature of the business world, Nash said. 

The loyalty and “camaraderie between union construction workers is unbeatable,” he said.

To save costs, existing signs have been kept and only new signs feature the correct spelling. The first new sign was erected on Feb. 5, 2020, and was celebrated at a ceremony that Nash attended. 

The sign pictured here features the correct spelling of Verrazzano.

“If it wasn’t for my petition, you can bet your bottom dollar the sign would not be fixed,” Nash said.