Somber-looking trustees in stovepipe hats climbed the stairs on the James Street side of the Brooklyn anchorage to pose for group portraits at the start of the footbridge, or they went off to Saratoga or the White Mountains with their families, confident the bridge was in good hands. And for thousands of New Yorkers and visitors, the footbridge had become one of the city’s greatest summertime attractions. Virtually anyone could go up and sample the view and test his nerve if he cared to. In fact, so many people were now applying for passes to take the walk that Henry Murphy was spending an hour every morning just listening to what the applicants had to say.
“People from every corner of the globe have crossed the bridge,” he said, “Australians, New Zealanders, a man from the Cape of Good Hope, and persons from every country in Europe and Asia, from every state in the Union, from Canada and South America. The Governor of Bermuda went across the other day, and the officers of the Russian man-of-war gave us a visit. Captains of steamships and merchantmen are frequent applicants, and we like to pass them, because they will have to sail under the bridge, and we desire their friendship.” As a general rule, five classes of applicants were granted every courtesy—foreign visitors (“They may never come again, and it is natural they should desire to cross the bridge while they have the opportunity,” Murphy explained), newspapermen, engineers, and all politicians and preachers.
Daily at the Bridge Company’s Brooklyn offices the crowds jammed the hallways and lobby waiting to see Murphy. Everyone had his particular reason for wanting permission to make the walk.
“I am a stranger here,” explained one applicant.
“Where are you from?” asked Murphy.
“From New York,” the man replied gravely, and the story was soon all over Brooklyn.
A Connecticut couple, both in their seventies, had walked over. Murphy even allowed a doctor and his wife to carry their newborn baby across. But when a Miss Mazeppa Buckingham requested permission to ride over on horseback, he said no. (Her agent proposed to hoist the horse up onto the Brooklyn anchorage with a sling.) “It would have made a great sensation,” Murphy told reporters, “but you see that’s just what we want to avoid. We don’t want to turn the bridge into a show.”
By the middle of August two or three thousand people had made the crossing, and most all of them went home to tell how he or she had been “one of the very first” to cross the Brooklyn Bridge and thus the claim would be passed along proudly to many thousands of grandchildren and to their progeny.
Amazingly, there were no accidents. Several men became so dizzy that they got down on their hands and knees and crawled back, hugging the slat floor for dear life. At least one woman fainted and had to be carried off; many started out, then turned back. Several people had gotten about halfway out over the river with no trouble but then suddenly froze with fear, unable to move one way or the other. One of these was a Brooklyn hatter who figured such a conspicuous display of daring would be good for his business.
Among the children to cross was Al Smith, whose father had been employed as a sort of guard to keep unauthorized people off the bridge and who “gave himself permission to take Alfred across,” as Smith’s sister told the story years later. Smith himself would often describe the hazardous journey over the footbridge as the most thrilling experience of his boyhood, while his sister would remark, “I remember Mother sitting at home, saying ten rosaries all the time they were gone! But my father was determined to take the boy across the bridge so he could say he crossed it before it was built.”
Murphy saw no reason why anyone should not be allowed to travel the footbridge, providing he had a comparatively valid reason and looked as though he would not do anything foolish out there. He was annoyed by the way people were cutting the wires and taking off pieces for souvenirs, but then it was the people’s bridge. None of the workmen seemed bothered by the sight-seers traipsing along. The thing they found most interesting was the number of women who passed by and how fearless they appeared. Murphy admitted to one reporter that he himself had not been across as yet. “I started to go once,” he said, “and while I looked upward or ahead I was all right; but I chanced to look down, and…and I determined that I couldn’t afford to lose the President of the company just then, and so I went back.”
And then it was September and a broken and aged-looking Tweed was standing before the New York Board of Aldermen telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth, on the understanding that if he did, “Honest John” Kelly would see that he was set loose from prison and be henceforth immune from further prosecution. It was at this time that Tweed described in his own words the part he had played in getting the bridge started and Henry Murphy and William Kingsley spent the better part of several days denying everything Tweed had to say about as fast as he said it.
And before the month was out an English seaman walking the footbridge was seized by an epileptic fit and it was all several workmen could do to hold on to him as he writhed in convulsions. In desperation they finally tied him to the narrow floor of the bridge, with his arms and legs hanging over the side. The man recovered shortly and was helped back to the ground, but the story was made so much of by the papers that Murphy promptly stopped issuing any more passes. The fun was over.
In early October workmen digging foundations for the Brooklyn approach turned up some old Spanish coins worth about sixteen cents at most and the story spread through town that Captain Kidd’s treasure had been discovered. One paper commented that if they kept digging they might find enough to finish the bridge. Another expressed great pleasure that the New York approach required the demolition of one of the city’s worst neighborhoods, and the Eagle, with nothing better to say apparently, ran a long macabre essay on the bridge as the coming place for the truly artistic suicide. “It is hardly necessary to point out to thoughtful men the splendor of a suicide committed from this virgin height.” Hanging, poison, blowing one’s “vulgar brains out” with a pistol, were all condemned for their “despicable lack of originality.” The river below is swift and treacherous, the editors wrote, and there would always be a good-sized audience on board the ferries. If jumping did not appeal, there were other choices. “Let us imagine a man addicted to hanging and think of the unique picture which early passengers would behold should they turn up their eyes in the ghostly dawn and see a man hanging by his neck fifty feet from the water’s edge! A little ingenuity would enable him to so affix one end of his rope that he could not be cut down for hours and could oscillate before the eyes of an admiring though horror-stricken crowd of thousands.” Even poison, shooting, and stabbing would have some style, the editors concluded, if done from the Great Bridge.
In October a well-to-do New Yorker named Henry Beers, a spokesman for the so-called Council of Political Reform, announced that he was joining the cause to have the bridge stopped. It was nothing but a flagrant waste of public money, he contended, and a serious hazard to navigation, which was the same claim being made by a warehouse owner named Abraham Miller, who had decided to sue the Bridge Company. English law, said Beers, who was assisting Miller, always held rivers and oceans sacred to seamen.
But the old buildings kept coming down inland from the New York anchorage as the path for the approach pressed toward City Hall Park. And out over the river the carrier wheels, glistening in the sunshine, kept spinning along, faster than ever. Never had he seen such weather for bridgebuilding, C. C. Martin said. By November, twenty-two strands were in place. On the cradles, little sentry boxes had been built where the men could get out of the cold while waiting for the carriers to come by. In the sheds over the saddles, wood stoves had been installed and the men were wearing heavy mittens and shoes of buffalo hide.
On Thanksgiving Day one of the wires snapped. It was considered a small matter. Nobody was injured and the newspapers heard nothing of it, but Paine decided to send a section of the wire over to Roebling for him to take a look. “It is as brittle as glass,” Roebling wrote back to Paine. “�
�The first question arises is how much of this same brittle wire has been going into the cable without our knowledge and secondly what steps must be taken to prevent its reoccurrence. Is it due to a wrong system of inspection or what is the reason in your opinion?”
Roebling also broke off several pieces of the wire and put them in with a letter to Henry Murphy.
“This is what Mr. Kinsella is pleased to call the best,” he wrote angrily. “In reality it is worthless…and the most dangerous material that could be employed. How much of this poor wire has been going into the cables I do not know. Can I be held responsible for that? It is scarcely right that the engineers should have to be acting as detectives. I see but one way of preventing such wire being run out and that is to double the number of inspectors at the contractor’s works.”
If Murphy read Roebling’s letter to the members of the Executive Committee at their next meeting, or to the trustees, there is no mention of it in the official records.
Kinsella and Roebling were running head on once more.
Bessemer steel had become a bone of contention again, exasperating the engineers no end. No issue it seemed ever stayed resolved for very long. This time the argument was over the suspenders, the wire ropes that would hang down from the cables to the roadway. Roebling had decided that Bessemer wire would do perfectly well and that was what he specified, but at the last minute, at Murphy’s urging, he had had the word “Bessemer” scratched out of the printed specifications. Again “steel wire” was all that was called for. Kinsella had been furious, exclaiming in the editorial columns of the Eagle that cost was no factor here, that no chain was stronger than its weakest link, etc., etc. The engineers had no business deciding such matters alone, he said. And when John A. Roebling’s Sons, the lowest bidder for the suspenders, was awarded the contract, Kinsella wrote that it was solely because Washington Roebling wanted it that way and that the contract should have gone to a Brooklyn firm (unnamed).
Henry Murphy was quoted as saying that Roebling had nearly died when the earlier contract was awarded to Haigh and that he, Murphy, had no wish to see that happen again. “All of which is bosh,” responded the Brooklyn Union and Argus. “We have as much sympathy for Mr. Roebling as other people…But, we submit, that this work is entirely superior to any man or all of the men concerned in its construction, and it cannot, nor any part of it, be subordinated to the whims, fancies, or caprices of a sick man.”
The paper refused to let the matter drop, writing scornfully of Roebling’s power and of the stupidity of the “stupendous enterprise being wholly committed to a single brain, which is extremely liable at any moment to be stilled forever.”
The sick man, meanwhile, had had a powerful telescope mounted at his window and trained on the bridge. As for the things being said about him in the papers, he had no comment. He would not see reporters.
Late one Saturday afternoon, shortly before Christmas, there was a bad accident behind the Brooklyn anchorage. Masons were finishing up a series of arches, set on big, square brick piers, that would support the roadway of the approach inland from the anchorage. The foreman noticed a great crack in one arch, about twenty-five feet above the street, and immediately ordered the men down off the work. But one man standing below never heard the warning and when the arch gave way he was buried.
The men started digging frantically through the rubble and in about ten minutes they found him, so badly crushed that he would have been difficult to identify had they not known who it was. The body was covered with a sheet of canvas and carried to a tool house. A big crowd had gathered around by then. The area was one of seeming chaos even under normal conditions, with heaps of brick and stone all about, swinging derricks, and their countless ropes, cement machines, scaffolds, great half-dug pits, and sixty or seventy men busy at one task or another. But now things were out of hand. Somebody began saying the other arches were coming down. There was a panic and the crowd went surging in every different direction and nobody seemed to know what was happening. Then somebody was saying something about one more man trapped under the debris. So half a dozen volunteers started digging again and the crowd rushed back to watch, fully expecting to see the rescue workers buried next.
By this time, too, the news had spread over to Fulton Street that a lot of men had been killed and a crowd coming from that direction was so big that the police had trouble holding them back.
No more arches fell and no other bodies were found, but an investigation was immediately called for and there was great public sympathy for the victim and his family. He was Neil Mullen, a Brooklyn man and a widower with six children.
A coroner’s inquest established that the centering, the temporary wooden supports used under the arches, had been removed before the mortar had set properly. The Brooklyn approach was McNulty’s domain and McNulty, who testified at the inquest, looked to be pretty much at fault. Roebling was infuriated by the whole affair. It was exactly the sort of thing he might have prevented had he been on the job. “The brick arch fell because it had a right to fall,” he wrote bitterly to Henry Murphy, who felt, understandably enough, that he ought to have an explanation on hand from the Chief Engineer. “Every arch, be it round or flat, must fall if its thrust is not met by an adequate lateral support,” Roebling lectured. “…The real accident was not so much that this arch fell, as that the other one stood.”
As to the matter of responsibility I am primarily responsible because it is my business to see that everything goes along right. Mr. McNulty is secondarily responsible because he was the engineer directly in charge of the construction and because he did not sufficiently heed the special warning I gave him about this very thing some weeks before its occurrence.
McNulty had told Roebling he did not know why he had removed the centering. “Ambitious natures are apt to be overconfident and to shrink from asking counsel of more experienced persons for fear their infallibility might be impugned,” Roebling wrote Murphy. “Time and age cures all this.” But then he added that the real explanation might be simply that McNulty was overworked.
Roebling could appreciate the problem. He himself was doing more now than he had since the long, difficult winter before the Centennial. For a great many people it might have appeared that his real work was nearly done. The engineering involved, the planning, and the decision making ought to be all but over, it would seem, now that the towers were up and the wire was going across. But it was not that way. Nor did Roebling by any means have everything all figured out.
In the public mind he had become a thorough mystery, the tragic victim of his own wondrous creation, cursed perhaps, like his father before him, remote, hidden, maybe a little mad, seeing everything and yet never seen. It was said he was so crippled that his wife had to feed him, which was true partly. It was said the disease had affected his mind, which was not true. And still, from a chair behind a distant window he could raise towers of granite and spin steel through the sky.
But for the man himself every detail was a personal concern and no answers came easily, despite the things said about his genius. Nothing could be taken for granted, especially now after the accident. Nobody could be trusted, completely. Anybody might let him down, including his father.
At the moment he was wrestling with the design of the enormous truss that would stiffen the roadway and wondering whether to make it of steel, instead of iron as his father had specified. He was not sure either if his father had made the truss big enough. He delegated Paine to find out all he could on the latest advances in steel-making. He wrote to Hildenbrand, day after day, pouring out his own thoughts, his doubts and questions, for pages.
There are so many points to be considered, so many conflicting interests to be reconciled on the parts of the truss that it is perfectly bewildering to pick out the best thing. For example, I want to reduce the aggregate weight so as to keep down the pressure on the masonry. I want to simplify the superstructure so as to make work in the shop easy and erection easy and safe and I
also want to keep down the wind surface as much as possible. On the other hand I want the truss sufficiently strong to resist a reasonable amount of bending, and this goes against the other points. But the only possible way in which I can reduce pressure on masonry and wind surface is by reducing the height and weight of the trusses and increasing the strain per square inch on the iron. I do not see that any reduction of weight is possible in any other parts of the structure. By making the truss rods as far as possible of steel we make some reduction in weight but it is only in the low truss that the rod section is great enough to enable us to attain any appreciable advantage by the substitution of steel for iron. In the high truss with rods through two panels the section is hardly sufficient to make it worth while to change. This therefore would be one argument in favor of again reducing the weight of the intermediate truss and leaving the rods in all the trusses within one panel. This includes the two central trusses even if they are arranged with a square bar in the middle of two flat ones outside.
He was working toward another momentous decision. And he was feeling his way. But days like this were what he enjoyed most.
His concern for incidentals was perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all. For him there were no incidentals. Everything counted. Nothing could be left to chance or for someone else to decide. Hildenbrand, Martin, Paine, Farrington, all heard from him daily now. It seemed he wanted them to know his every thought.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 123