It had taken fourteen years. In another few weeks he would be forty-six years old. He had spent nearly a third of his life on this one bridge, nearly as much time as his father had given to all his major bridges combined.
His health was much improved. The nearer the end came the better he felt. He could get about the house much more easily than before or go out into the garden. His eyesight had returned. It was a little as though he himself had returned from a long absence. He could read the papers again, for one thing—about General George Crook chasing Apaches across the border into Mexico that spring or about the housewarming party given by Mrs. William Vanderbilt at her limestone palace on Fifth Avenue, the most lavish and costly fancy-dress ball ever put on in the United States (an estimated $250,000) and reputedly the greatest social event of the age. According to the Times the costume problem alone “disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks.” Abram Hewitt came as King Lear, “while yet in his right mind,” the paper noted, a remark that doubtless cheered Washington Roebling.
In the time he had spent on the bridge, the telephone and the electric light had been introduced. (What a difference they would have made during the work inside the caissons.) Now at night he could see hundreds of electric lights burning over in New York, directly across the river, in the blocks Edison had first lit the summer before, when Roebling was at Newport.
Instead of one transcontinental railroad, there were now four and a fifth was under construction. There were ten million more people in the country than there had been in 1869. (Brooklyn had grown by 180,000; New York by more than 200,000.) The buffalo had been all but exterminated on the Great Plains and Chester A. Arthur had installed modern plumbing in the White House. Robert E. Lee was dead. Horace Greeley, Jesse James, Brigham Young, Emerson, Crazy Horse, Peter Cooper, they were all dead now. A whole era had passed. His own son would be entering RPI in the fall.
The bridge had taken nearly three times as long as his father had said it would and it had cost $15 million, which was more than twice what his father had estimated. It had taken the lives of twenty men, not including his own father. * The price he himself had paid was long since past reckoning.
Henry Slocum had failed to become governor, because of the bridge mainly. Now Henry Murphy, too, was under the ground at Greenwood.
Would they all have gone ahead with it anyway back in 1869 had they known what was involved? It was a question neither Washington Roebling nor anyone else would ever be able to answer.
When the Democratic state convention opened in Syracuse late the previous September, it had been obvious that the nomination for governor was going to be worth a very great deal. A few days before, in Saratoga, the Republicans had picked a lackluster candidate named Charles Folger, who was generally taken to be what he was—a stooge for President Arthur and the infamous Jay Gould. Not even the Republican faithful had been able to get very enthusiastic about Folger. So in Syracuse, as the Democrats gathered inside the Grand Opera House, spirits were running high and especially among the Kings County delegation, for it had looked even to impartial observers as though General Henry Slocum would be the party’s choice. But instead the convention had picked an unknown upstate lawyer, the reform mayor of Buffalo, Grover Cleveland, who had been considered strictly a local candidate before the balloting began.
Slocum’s only serious rival had been Roswell P. Flower, a debonair Congressman from Watertown who had made a fortune on Wall Street and who, like Folger, was handicapped by his friendship with Jay Gould, as well as by a bad lisp that was sometimes linked unkindly with his name. But just as the convention was about to open, the World, then owned by Gould, began a series of sensational articles on the “Bridge Frauds.” The Tweed disclosures were published in full still one more time, as though they were all new history. Every prior example of corruption within the Bridge Company, documented or alleged, was assembled into a massive attack on the Brooklyn men who had been behind the project. It was charged that three million dollars had been stolen outright during the early years of the work, that Kingsley and Stranahan were little better than common crooks, but, unlike Tweed, so skillful at covering their tracks that proof of their guilt would be next to impossible to come by. Once again Henry Murphy was asked for a statement and once again he denied the charges, as did Stranahan. Kingsley refused to see reporters. Only Thomas Kinsella was willing to talk and he said the fanfare was nothing more than politics.
“I consider it a very bold movement on the part of Jay Gould to get control of the Democratic party, just as he has already got control of the Republican party,” Kinsella said. “In my opinion it is all politics and very bad politics, too. It is as transparent as glass, and anybody can easily see through it. Kingsley, one of the men attacked, is quite likely to appear as a delegate to the Syracuse convention, while General Slocum, one of the trustees, is the man who will undoubtedly be placed in antagonism with Congressman Flower for the nomination for governor. The object, it appears to me, is to cast odium on these men, and break them down in advance of the convention.” Kingsley was not only a delegate, he led the Kings County delegation, solidly committed to Slocum, and Kinsella would be the one to deliver the speech putting Slocum’s name before the convention.
The great issue at first had been the seating of the Tammany delegates, supposedly representing 45,000 voters and headed by that old enemy of the bridge, “Honest John” Kelly. Until late the night before the balloting was to begin, it had looked as though the Tammany delegates would not be let in. But then some of Kelly’s people came calling on the Kings County Democrats to beg for their support. The meeting lasted far into the night, when Kingsley at last agreed to go to work for Kelly. As a result the Tammany delegates were seated and Slocum’s backers went into the convention confident Slocum would get the nomination on the second ballot.
But a man named Ira Shafer, a Flower supporter, gave a speech referring at some length to Slocum’s connection with the bridge and its “gross frauds,” and this, on top of the World “disclosures,” was, as the Times reported, “the means of frightening many of the country delegates who were friendly to General Slocum, but feared the effect his association with the original promoters of the bridge enterprise might have…”
Slocum was also strongly opposed by an influential reform faction from New York City known as the County Democracy, the head of which was none other than Abram S. Hewitt.
As a result Slocum and Flower were deadlocked on the first ballot. Kelly had not delivered for Slocum, but split his votes, biding his time. The Brooklyn men felt they had been double-crossed. There was a fierce scramble to pick up votes but on the second ballot Slocum and Flower were deadlocked again. But this time Hewitt and Kelly had both gone for Cleveland and that decided it. The Flower delegates immediately abandoned their man and Cleveland won on the third ballot. As a consolation prize, Slocum was later nominated for Congressman-at-Large.
William Kingsley and his delegation returned to Brooklyn bitterly disappointed and talking freely with reporters of their disgust with Kelly, who, as they said, would never have been seated in the first place had it not been for their help. Kelly answered later that he himself had never said a word about supporting Slocum, which was quite true.
In November Cleveland defeated the Republican Folger by the largest majority ever given a candidate for governor. Slocum was elected to Congress, but among Brooklyn Democrats there were wistful reflections on what might have been. In an inverse way the bridge had made the Buffalo man governor.
Once the elections were over, the papers had little more to say about bridge frauds. The clamor over corruption ceased instantly. But on November 20, determined to settle the issue once and for all, Mayors Low and Grace, with the approval of the trustees, appointed two accountants to examine fully all receipts, vouchers, papers, payrolls, and all other documents connected with the bridge, “and especially to investigate the books and papers of
the Bridge as they bear upon the charges made by the New York World and others against the Trustees.” It would be a year before their findings would be made public, and they would cause no stir whatever. There were vouchers on file, the accountants reported, for total expenditures of $15,211,982.92. Due to certain clerical errors overpayments to contractors came to $9,578.67 and those were the only discrepancies found in the company’s books, all of which had been “honestly and neatly kept.”
As it happened, and as no one realized at the time, November 20 was also Henry Murphy’s last day at the Bridge Company. That night he came down with a bad cold. On Friday, December 1, 1882, he was dead.
As the papers reported, Murphy, at age seventy-two, had been in good health up until the night he took sick. As regular as clockwork he had left his house each morning at nine and walked to his law offices on Court Street, where he and his two old partners, Lott and Vanderbilt, both dead now, had long been such fixtures. Later in the morning he would go over to Montague Street to the Coney Island Railroad offices, stay perhaps an hour, then walk down to the Bridge Company, where he generally spent the remainder of the day. On the 20th he had gone home about five.
His cold had turned to pneumonia a day or so later, but it was his heart that killed him, according to the papers, and from what his son said in an interview, it seems he died in terrible agony. The time of death was six in the morning.
“At the clubs and other places where men gathered, the deceased was the general topic of conversation,” wrote the Eagle, the paper he had founded. The feeling was that the day marked the end of an era. Murphy had been a historic figure, everyone felt. He was the closest thing to a Founding Father Brooklyn ever had, both in his personal grace and in the things he had accomplished. To many he had seemed a last holdover from a vanished golden age. His passing was like the tolling of a bell, as almost everyone who wrote about it tried to express in one way or other.
The bridge trustees called a special meeting and with Kingsley presiding, sitting in Murphy’s old chair, a long formal statement of grief was drawn up, saying, among other things, that the bridge would remain a memorial to Henry Cruse Murphy.
The major things still to be seen to by mid-May were these: the electric lights were not yet fully installed; the big iron terminal buildings at either end of the bridge were nowhere near ready; and it would be September at least before the bridge trains would begin running between the terminals. But there were no more specifications to get up, no more contracts to sign, and everything was being handled with the greatest dispatch by Roebling’s immensely capable assistants. Amazingly, they were all still on the job, after fourteen years, even Collingwood, who had signed up originally for a month only. Except for Farrington, not one, in all that time, had quit out of discouragement or frustration or to take a better-paying position, several of which had been offered. Not one had been relieved of his job. Roebling’s own sense of duty and determination had been matched in kind. Every man he had hired had proved up to the work. For some, such as McNulty, it was the only work they had ever known.
The bridge itself looked now about as it did in the drawing Hildenbrand had done for the Centennial Exhibition, except that there were no crowning capstones on the towers, as John Roebling had wanted, and there never would be because of cost. The towers, of course, had been standing there for nearly seven years now and were an accepted part of the landscape. But with the last of the timber falsework removed from inside the archways, they looked now as they were supposed to, like colossal Gothic gateways to the two cities.
But it was the finished span between them that made the towers seem so much more important and purposeful than ever before. It was the finished roadway, arching slowly, gracefully upward over the river to meet at the center with the great downward swoop of the cables, that made it a suspension bridge at last—and the greatest on earth. And finally, now, the diagonal stays were in place, hundreds of them, radiating down from the tower tops, angling across the vertical harp-string pattern of the suspenders, and forming what, at close range, looked like a powerful steel net, or, from a distance, as Roebling saw it, like a vast, finespun web. The bridge now, as never before, was a thrilling thing to see.
More even than the other modern structures people flocked to gape at in New York, the bridge could look extremely different at different times of day, and depending on one’s vantage point. From the narrow, low-lying streets on the New York side, for example, one got relatively little sense of its long reach over the river, or what it might be reaching out to. The impression, instead, was one of fantastic upward magnitude, of breath-taking elevation, the tower in the foreground and the roadway it carried within its arches upstaging whatever else the bridge might be achieving beyond the tower.
The very shabbiness and stunted scale of the old neighborhood beneath the tower worked to the advantage of the bridge, which by contrast seemed an embodiment of the noblest aspirations, majestic, heaven-directed, lifting into the light above the racket, the shabbiness, and the confusion of the waterfront, the way a great cathedral rises over the hovels of the faithful. And the twin archways in the tower, seen from street level, looked like vast vacant windows to the sky. For a child seeing it at night, the tower could have been the dark and mighty work of medieval giants. Where on earth could one see so many stars framed in granite?
The roadway to the tower was finished now but was still closed off at Chatham Street by a high board fence plastered thick with theater posters and handbills. And along the roadway unsightly heaps of rubbish stood waiting to be carted off. Even so, there was nothing in the average person’s experience to compare to this spacious, beckoning, empty thoroughfare. It climbed up and out of the city like something seen in dreams. It was a highway people just naturally wanted to travel, even if they had no interest in the smaller, more sedate city they knew to be at the other end. To the New Yorker who lived within its shadow, it was not just a bridge to Brooklyn—few New Yorkers had any special desire to go to Brooklyn—it was a highway into the open air. When the day came when everyone could go out on it, when people by the tens of thousands could go up that road and through those colossal arches, they would go, they knew, not to Brooklyn, but to a place where sailing ships would glide like toys beneath their feet, where they could look down on the tallest buildings and their own mean, narrow streets and the people in them, where they could gaze out over land and water and everything man-made. “What a relief it will be from the ill-smelling streets and stuffy shops,” one man wrote. “What a happy escape from those dreadful cabins on the ferryboats! What a grand place to stretch your legs of a bright winter’s day after toiling through the streets! To go from shore to shore in one straight and jolly tramp, with the sky for a roof and the breeze for good company.”
Even before the bridge was opened it had become a symbol of something impossible to define that made New York different from every other city on earth. The bridge dominated the imagination the way it dominated the skyline, as Al Smith would say when reminiscing about his boyhood.
The view from the water, from the deck of a passing ferry or excursion steamer, a view being enjoyed daily by many thousands, was, of course, very different still. From there the elaborate and extremely interesting steel understructure was plainly visible overhead. From there, for example, one could see the wind braces Roebling had put in, something that would be hidden from the view of travelers on the bridge itself. These were cable stays designed to prevent horizontal vibrations. They were anchored to the corners of the towers, beneath the deck of the bridge, and extended diagonally under the deck to attach to the opposite side. The longest of them reached a third of the way across the central span and there were similar braces on the land spans.
But it was the over-all arc of the entire bridge that impressed people most when they saw it from the river, and again it seemed somehow above and beyond ordinary experience. Even the most so-phisticated and analytical observers felt this. An editor from Scientific America
n wrote, “…the bridge is a marvel of beauty viewed from the level of the river. In looking at its vast stretch, not only over the river between the towers, but over the inhabited, busy city shore, it appears to have a character of its own far above the drudgeries and exactions of the lower business levels.”
Still, the finest view of all, perhaps, was from Brooklyn Heights. Visually the bridge belonged to the Heights as it did to no other point on land.
The bridge was just far enough distant and the elevation of the Heights such that the scale of everything seemed more manageable. The towers did not loom up all out of proportion as they did from the streets of New York. There was little foreshortening of the great span. Moreover, the other essential components—the cables, suspenders, trusswork along the deck, the anchorages—could be plainly seen and in proper perspective, their function and relationship to the rest of the bridge being neither concealed nor distorted. Were one to draw a picture to explain how the bridge worked, about the easiest, clearest way would be to show it as it looked from the rear window of a house on Columbia Heights in the spring of 1883, when there was nothing on the Brooklyn side blocking the view and the skyline of Manhattan was, by later standards, quite restrained.
From the Heights it was perfectly clear why the bridge had been built. Its practicality, no less than its grandeur, was unmistakable. There below was the sparkling river and there beyond was New York, stretched out before the eye like an enormous scale model. The bridge was the way to get there. It was the great highway to New York, just as had been intended from the start. And while Brooklyn in the mind of the average New Yorker might remain an indeterminable, even dubious, destination, for everyone living in Brooklyn, New York was a known quantity and the reasons for wishing to get there—and to get back again—were quite clear.
David McCullough Library E-book Box Set Page 133