Brooklyn Bridge

The Brooklyn Bridge took thirteen years, cost more than fifteen million dollars, killed somewhere between twenty and thirty men, and when it opened in 1883 it was the longest suspension span in the world by half again.

John Roebling designed it and never saw a stone laid. Surveying the Brooklyn tower site in 1869, his foot was crushed by a ferry against a piling. He refused conventional treatment, contracted tetanus and died within weeks.

His son Washington took over and was destroyed by the work in a slower way. The foundations were sunk using caissons \u2014 enormous inverted wooden boxes pumped full of compressed air so men could excavate the riverbed beneath them. Nobody understood decompression sickness. Men came up too fast, doubled over in pain, and a number died. Washington Roebling worked in the caissons himself, was permanently disabled by it, and spent the remaining decade directing construction from a window in Brooklyn Heights with a telescope.

Emily Roebling then ran the project in all but name. She learned the mathematics, the cable specifications and the site management, dealt with the contractors and the trustees, and was for years the only person carrying instructions between her husband and the bridge. When the trustees moved to remove Washington from the post, she argued his case and won. She was the first person to cross the finished bridge, carrying a rooster.

There was also a fraud. A wire contractor supplied defective cable and it was discovered only after some of it was already in place. It could not be removed, so Roebling ordered additional wires added throughout \u2014 which is why the bridge is roughly six times stronger than it needs to be, an accident of dishonesty that has kept it standing for a century and a half.

The photographs of construction are extraordinary because the towers rose alone for years before any deck existed, standing in the East River connected to nothing. The cable spinning that followed, with men working on catwalks hundreds of feet above the water without restraint of any kind, produced images that would not be permitted today.

The promenade above the traffic was Roebling\u2019s idea and is the reason people photograph the bridge the way they do \u2014 the cables converging overhead through the Gothic arches of the towers.

Six days after it opened, someone in the crowd on the promenade shouted that the bridge was collapsing. Twelve people were crushed to death in the panic. P. T. Barnum settled the question the following year by walking twenty-one elephants across it, led by Jumbo, which was both a publicity stunt and a genuinely persuasive engineering demonstration.

The bridge changed the shape of both cities immediately. Brooklyn had been the third largest city in the country in its own right, and the bridge is what made consolidation into Greater New York thinkable in 1898. A great many of the photographs are really about that — two cities becoming one place.

Roebling had a specific reason for the Gothic arches. Suspension bridges of the period had a poor safety record and the public did not trust them, so the towers were built in masonry and detailed as architecture rather than engineering, to reassure people who would otherwise not have walked across.

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