A View from the Bridge

An aging lawyer named Alfieri introduces us to the neighborhood: Red Hook, Brooklyn. He addresses the audience directly, and tells us that in the days when he was young, after he first immigrated from Italy, the streets were meaner. Then, gangsters like Al Capone and Franky Yale ran the neighborhood. But those days are over, and he explains that the passionate justice of the old world has been traded in for a new American civility. “Now we settle for half, and I like it better,” he says, “I no longer keep a pistol in my filing cabinet.”

Despite the peace and promise of the new world, Alfieri explains that every once in a while a case comes along which makes him imagine that an ancient Roman lawyer might have once “heard the same complaint and sat there as powerless as I, and watched it run its bloody course.” He introduces us to Eddie Carbone, a longshoreman, returning home after a long day unloading a ship on the Brooklyn docks.

Eddie arrives home in a flurry of excitement and