Hell Gate Bridge is the colloquial name for one section of a large system of railroad bridges connecting Queens to Manhattan and the Bronx. Hell Gate refers to the body of water which separates northern Queens from Ward’s Island; it is also the point at which the Harlem River joins the East River. The name was first used by the Dutch, who called it Hellgat (or "hell channel") because of the great difficulties it presented for sailors wishing to pass through it. The "huge span" shown in drawing seventeen is over one thousand feet long, and was, at the time of its completion in 1917, the longest stele arch bridge in the world. Nevertheless it falls quite short of Marcus’ "six miles." Even the network of bridges of which Hell Gate Bridge is a part (most of which is not properly called Hell Gate Bridge) has a total length of only two and one half miles. It is not certain whether Marcus simply over-estimated the length of the bridge network or exaggerated that length for rhetorical effect.

In either case the six mile figure is rhetorically important because it emphasizes Marcus’ use of the bridge as metaphor for connection and commonality – the Bridge is imagined to lay over Manhattan, connecting the extremes of uptown and downtown. While connection between different points might seem an obvious (if not necessary) symbolic resonance of the trope of the bridge, the representations of bridges in the book’s preceding chapters are remarkable for their refusal of this trope. Drawing seventeen is the first in the book to show a bridge actually connecting two points – the first to show both ends of any bridge. Chapter ten’s rendering of the Brooklyn Bridge as sentry – especially given that chapters resonance with the Masonic "Two Pillars" – is almost aggressive in its refusal to let the bridge represent the possibility of connection across difference. Where the Brooklyn Bridge in chapter ten served to reinforce the sense of New York as an irredeemably other – a world into which one enters as one would another planet – the Hell Gate Bridge here begins to destabilize the early chapter’s radical opposition between New York City and the rest of the world.

Just as the drawing of Hell Gate Bridge begins to articulate an alternative to the alienating features of New York’s singularity, the prose in chapter seventeen is the first to allude to New York’s status as "The Nation’s Metropolis." The sudden and belated appearance of nationality in the text may seem to diverge from the narrative trajectory of the preceding chapters, but chapter seventeen suggests that the book’s theory of nationality will draw heavily upon those earlier chapters’ concerns. The problem of nationality in the twentieth century, as chapter seventeen understand it, is part of an overarching problem of disjunctive and fractured history. Manhattan is presented here as the link between the America’s oldest and newest regions – New England and the far West, respectively. It occupies this position in part because of its geographical location, but Marcus argues that New York is so successful in conjoining the extremes of the past and the forward-looking present only because it has produced in itself the most disjunctive and heterogeneous amalgam of old and new in America. New York’s total failure as a coherent environment allows it to succeed as a common ground for America’s most disparate regions. New York is in this sense a martyred city; it endows the nation with a unified identity by relinquishing its own. It is the nation’s metropolis only because it can no longer belong to itself.