The Brooklyn Boy Who Finished the Panama Canal

George Washington Goethals was born in Brooklyn on June 29, 1858, to Flemish immigrant parents, and went on to graduate second in his class of 52 at West Point in 1880 before joining the Army Corps of Engineers. In February 1907, with the Panama Canal project bogged down and its chief engineers quitting one after another, President Theodore Roosevelt handed the job to Goethals, a colonel with no patience for excuses. He ran the canal zone like a military command, driving the work through disease, landslides, and brutal terrain until the Canal opened in 1914, two years ahead of schedule, and then served as the Panama Canal Zone's first governor. Decades later, the Port Authority named a crossing between Staten Island and Elizabeth, New Jersey after him, and when that span was replaced in 2017 the new bridge kept his name.