The river now looked very different than it had in the early days of the work. Traffic was heavier, it moved faster, and there was a good deal more coal smoke trailing in the wind. The river was change itself—ships coming and going, sails turning in the sun, cloud shadows crossing over from New Jersey, gulls circling and diving, the water changing color with the sky, the other shore now very near, now distant, depending on the light or atmospheric conditions, the tides running. But over it all, triumphant and immovable, stood the bridge, seeming to hold the land in place against all change. On the one hand it was a vaulting avenue over the river, defying space and gravity like some weightless natural phenomenon (“…high over all the Great Bridge swept across the sky,” a novelist would write), but it was also fixed, deep-rooted. It was as though the two cities might drift apart were the bridge not there. The bridge kept things in place. It belonged.
There were some, of course, who for the rest of their lives would see the bridge in other ways. For them it would be an emblem of colossal greed and deception, of hideous physical torture and unbearable grief. There were people on both sides of the river who would look at its commanding silhouette and see the faces of Tweed, “Brains” Sweeny, and the rest, leering, with black eyes full of sly deception, as Nast had drawn them. There were those who would follow with their eye the path of the great cables in the sunshine (“…the arching path/ Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings of wires,…telepathy,” the poet Hart Crane would write) and think only of the bad steel woven into them forever. And there were those, in tenements back from the river, for whom the lofty towers would remain a day in summer when the broken corpse of a husband or father was brought to the door in a spring wagon.
The only major parts of the bridge that Roebling could not see from his house were the two terminal buildings and once, in late April, he had been taken by carriage to have a first look at the one in Brooklyn that McNulty had designed. The big, curved two-story building, which was to be twice the size of the station at the other end, was little more than half built then. Still it had looked most impressive, even on dingy Sands Street, where the main entrance was to be and where Roebling’s carriage stopped. A reporter who visited the New York terminal about the same time wrote of “an almost deafening din of a hundred workmen hammering away for dear life.” In Brooklyn the noise must have been twice as bad.
From here, on the upper level, the bridge trains would leave for New York. The commuter would pay his fare at one of several ornamental iron toll booths (“pretty enough for opera boxes”), then climb a broad iron stairway to the waiting platforms. The cavernous building itself, as was already apparent, was to be an extremely ornate affair, like the elevated railroad stations in New York, with all kinds of fancy ironwork, panels, pillars, molding, and row on row of plate-glass windows. Once finished, the whole building was to be painted a dark red.
The bridge trains would be much like the newest cars on New York’s elevated trains. They would have large windows, double sliding doors, open platforms in front and back, and they would appear to be self-propelled, unless one were to look between the tracks and see the steel traction cable they hooked on to. (At the time Roebling paid his visit to Sands Street, workmen were installing the two 300-horsepower horizontal steam engines that would supply the power for the cable. The engines were located beneath the Brooklyn approach, but their boilerhouse, at Washington and Prospect, with its very conspicuous smokestack, was one of the other changes brought to the neighborhood by the bridge.)
The trip across on the bridge train was to take five minutes, as John Roebling had said it would, and the fare would be five cents. A horse and rider using the roadway would also pay five cents, a horse and vehicle ten cents. The charge for cattle would be five cents each, sheep and hogs two cents. Anyone wishing to walk over by the elevated promenade would have to pay a penny, although there was a movement in Albany, started by William Kingsley, to make the bridge free to pedestrians.
Roebling did not get out of his carriage the day he came to inspect the Brooklyn terminal. After he had seen enough he was driven home again. So not once in all fourteen years did he ever set foot on the bridge.
The terminal buildings were among the several things he had had to occupy his mind during these final months, and like the electric lights or the iron railings for the promenade or the plans for the opening celebration—all things that would have seemed very much after the fact, trivial even, in times past—he gave them his full attention, concerned over every last detail, as always, the totally disciplined professional to the very end.
A contract for lighting the bridge with seventy electric arc lamps had been awarded to the United States Illuminating Company, as he had recommended. The cost was to be eighteen thousand dollars, which was several thousand less than what the Edison Company had bid for doing the job with incandescent lamps. But cost had not been the deciding factor. Roebling had concluded that the sputtering blue-white arc lamps would be superior to the Edison type for lighting large areas. *
The dynamos to furnish power for the lamps were set up in the engine room of the Brooklyn terminal. A reporter who visited this generating station as it was about to be put into service gave the following description:
The scene suggested the subterranean laboratory of a magician. Blue lights burned, invisible engines shook the ground with ponderous stroke, and a dozen grim and anxious men toiled in the ghastly glare. Around these perspiring men stood two or three directors, giving orders and hastening the work. Great belts, a yard wide, ran over dynamo pulleys at a frightful speed, and eight or ten other pulleys were awaiting new belts which were hanging slack over their shafting.
It was as though the monstrous bridge was about to be jolted to life by a sudden massive charge from this eerie laboratory, like the creature in Mrs. Shelley’s story of Dr. Frankenstein.
The lamps themselves were being mounted on posts set on top of the steel trusswork, beside the promenade, at intervals of about one hundred feet. When the night came to turn them on, it would mark the first use of electric light over a river.
As before, Emily was serving as her husband’s principal contact with the work. She was still going to the bridge regularly, and some days two and three times. There were the usual messages to deliver, answers to bring back, and things he had asked her to keep an eye out for. Once when a manufacturer had been puzzled as to how a particular part of the superstructure should be formed and had come to the Roebling house to get some questions answered, she had made a drawing to show how it could be done, carefully explaining each step. Now she could see to its proper installation as well, and any doubts there may have been among the men about her ability to pass judgment on such matters had long since vanished.
Then in early May, when the last of the superstructure was in place, the roadway at last completed, and the time had come to send a carriage across—to test the effect of a trotting horse—Roebling had asked that she be the first person to ride over. The others on the staff and in the bridge offices agreed wholeheartedly. So one fine morning she and a coachman had crossed over from Brooklyn in a new victoria, its varnish gleaming in the sunshine. She had taken a live rooster along with her, as a symbol of victory, and from one end of the bridge to the other, the men had stopped their work to cheer and lift their hats as she came riding by.
Now, the week before the bridge was to be opened, Roebling had agreed to another interview. Apparently he and Emily had decided there was little damage that could be done at this late date, provided they kept the conversation brief and pleasant, and that is the way it went.
The man was from the Union, Brooklyn’s Republican paper, which had recently made the bridge the dominant pictorial element in its logotype. His name is not known, but he wrote later that this was the first time he had seen Roebling in eleven years.
Emily received him in the library. Colonel Roebling was resting in his room upstairs, she said. He had spent the morning sitting for a sculptor who wa
s doing a bust for the opening ceremonies and he was feeling a little tired just now.
When the reporter inquired for the Colonel’s health, she told him not to be surprised if he found her husband looking a good deal healthier than he might expect. “He is not so sick as people imagine,” she said. “The difficulty with him is that it wearies him to talk for any extended time. Any unusual exertion is sure to be followed by prostration, and the effort of talking or listening for any extended time has a very debilitating effect.”
The reporter wanted to know if Colonel Roebling would be taking part in the grand opening. No, he would not, she said. The excitement would be too much for him. “After the ceremonial at Sands Street and the procession are over, we will receive our friends here,” she continued. “Colonel Roebling will take part in the reception as long as he can stand the strain…”
She handed him an engraved invitation, a large white card from Tiffany & Co. In the upper left-hand corner was a small portrait of Roebling, resting on a laurel branch. His name and professional title were on a scroll underneath. To the right of the portrait, extending across the top of the card, as though seen in the distance, was the bridge, “in perfect detail,” as the reporter noted. The invitation itself read as follows:
THE EAST RIVER BRIDGE
will be opened to the public
Thursday, May twenty-fourth, at 2 o’clock.
Col. & Mrs. Washington A. Roebling
request the honor of your company
after the opening ceremony until seven o’clock.
110 Columbia Heights
Brooklyn
R.s.v.p.
The reporter asked if Colonel Roebling was likely to undertake any other great work, now that the bridge was finished. According to the article he wrote later, “Mrs. Roebling elevated her brows and said decisively, ‘Oh, no. This is his last as well as his greatest work. He will need a long rest after this is over. He needs it and he has certainly earned it.’”
Then she excused herself to go upstairs to see if her husband was ready to receive him. When she returned, she asked if he would please follow her.
“The writer found the Chief Engineer of the greatest suspension bridge in the world walking about his room and wearing a light spring overcoat and a soft felt hat,” he wrote. On a side table he noted “an imposing array of medicine phials.” But Roebling did indeed look better than he had expected—much better. He had put on weight and was noticeably fuller in the face and his hair and beard were streaked with gray. He was much paler, too, than he had been, and when he came forward to shake hands, his step appeared “short and a little uncertain.” But to judge by appearances, time had not been altogether unkind to Roebling, the reporter decided. “Seen at a standstill or sitting in an easy chair, with one leg thrown over the back of another, no one would suppose that this robust-looking gentleman, with massive forehead, without a wrinkle, and keen gray eye that lights up wonderfully in conversation, was a victim to one of the most terrible diseases known to medical science.” It was only in the lines around the eyes, the reporter said, that Roebling’s face revealed any traces of past suffering.
The three of them sat down and the only thing serious touched on in the conversation that followed was the question of locomotives on the bridge, a subject about which there was still some curiosity in Brooklyn but little reliable information to go by.
“There will be no difficulty about running such locomotives as they use on the elevated railroad in New York across the bridge,” said Roebling, who seemed to be having no difficulty speaking. “It was built to sustain them, and there would not be a particle of risk in it.” If anyone wanted to transfer two or three passenger cars from a railroad in Brooklyn to one in New York, using a small locomotive, that too would be possible. The bridge had been built to sustain such weight. But he was still “unalterably opposed” to full-sized locomotives. The reporter wanted to know about Pullman cars.
“Oh, don’t say that you would not consent to Pullman cars,” Emily Roebling said. “You know you promised Mr. Stranahan that Pullman cars could go across.”
At which, according to the reporter, Roebling laughed and replied, “Do you know what Mr. Stranahan wants? He wants a Pullman car to go right up to his back yard. He wants to be able to step into it at his house, ride across the bridge and up to Saratoga without changing his seat. That’s what he wants.”
Then, according to the reporter’s account, Roebling suddenly began to look very tired. Perhaps he had said too much. “I congratulate you on the successful termination of your great work,” the reporter said, standing up to leave. “I suppose this will be the last of the kind you will undertake.”
“I don’t know,” Roebling answered. “If I get well there is lots of big work in the world to do yet.” And with that the interview ended.
Plans for the great occasion were now complete. According to all accounts it was to be the biggest celebration in New York since the opening of the Erie Canal. For Brooklyn, said the Times, it was certain to be “the greatest gala day in the history of that moral suburb.” It was to be known as “The People’s Day.”
Mayor Seth Low was the one chiefly behind the idea. He had proclaimed it an official holiday in Brooklyn. He would decorate and illuminate his own home, he said, and urged all his neighbors to do the same. He called on Brooklyn business establishments to close for the day and already most of them had sent out neatly printed cards saying they would. Schools would be out, most stores would be closed.
About thirteen thousand tickets from Tiffany had been issued by the trustees. Seven thousand of them, a pale-blue color and the size of a theater thicket, were good for admittance to the bridge on the opening day. The rest, large, stiff white cards with an engraved view of the bridge, were for the ceremonies to be held inside the Brooklyn terminal.
President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, and their parties were to walk over the bridge from New York, escorted by Mayor Franklin Edson, the Seventh Regiment, and a seventy-five piece band. They would be met on the bridge by an official delegation from Brooklyn and proceed to the Sands Street terminal for the formal ceremonies. James Stranahan would preside. William Kingsley, as acting president of the bridge trustees, would formally present the bridge to Mayors Edson and Low, each of whom was expected to make a few brief remarks. Then the “principal orations” of the day were to be delivered by two gentlemen selected as fitting representatives of their home cities, Abram Hewitt for New York and for Brooklyn the Reverend Dr. Storrs. After a private reception at the home of the Chief Engineer, there was to be a dinner for the President and the Governor down the street at the home of Mayor Low. A fireworks display at the bridge would begin at eight and would be followed by a public reception for the President at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The North Atlantic Squadron—the Tennessee, Kearsarge, Saratoga, Yantic, and Vandalia—had been ordered to Brooklyn to take part in the celebration. The Minnesota had already arrived and was anchored off the Battery. Guns would be fired from the Navy Yard, from Governors Island, from the warships. A theatrical promoter, Commodore Joe Tooker, had chartered the mammoth excursion steamer Grand Republic and planned to steam up and down beneath the bridge and fire guns from his deck as well. “Bell-ringing, steam-whistling, and band-playing are among the incidental attractions offered the patrons of this boat,” the papers reported.
Brooklyn wharf owners were inviting select friends to spend the evening with them on their piers. Innumerable New York business firms with offices overlooking the river were inviting favorite customers to watch from their windows. Janitors in the tallest buildings on Printing House Square were overrun by applicants for admission to their roofs. All tenants in the Morse Building, at Nassau and Beekman Streets, had been told they could watch from the roof. The tops of the Temple Court Building on the opposite corner and the Mills Building nearby were also to be open. Richard K. Fox, the flamboyant proprietor of the Police Gazette, had sent out ten thousand invitations to wat
ch the show from his new building on Franklin Square, thinking possibly several hundred recipients might appear.
Popular interest in all this was considerable, to say the least, and the press made much of it, including the New York World, which had changed hands just the month before. Jay Gould had sold the paper to young Joseph Pulitzer of St. Louis, and the new owner not only considered the Brooklyn Bridge a historic event, in the way the Eads bridge had been, but thought the World’s previous hostility to the mammoth new structure was just plain bad publishing. The World now loved the bridge.
Indeed, the only people who seemed displeased with the arrangements being made were some of the more militant Irish, who in mid-April had suddenly realized that the 24th happened also to be Queen Victoria’s birthday and so began angrily protesting the date selected. The Central Labor Union issued a statement calling on “all good men and women in both cities to remember this latest insult of the would-be aristocratic element in our midst.” The Tribune answered that “it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to fix upon a day that did not commemorate something or other unpleasant for Ireland,” and as the appointed day drew nearer, there was talk of Irish fanatics, “Dynamite Patriots,” attempting to blow up the bridge.
The idea of a grand celebration did not much appeal to Washington Roebling either. Kingsley, too, Roebling understood, was of a like mind and had suggested to the trustees that once everything was in order they simply put up a sign saying “The Bridge Is Open.” But the other trustees had been against that, and Seth Low especially. As early as March a committee had been formed to make the arrangements.
When he heard later what was being planned, Roebling had grown extremely uneasy. If there were to be fireworks, he wrote to the trustees, then the bridge must be cleared of all spectators. If there were to be soldiers participating in parades on the main span, then they must not march in step. He was also concerned about how many people might be permitted onto the bridge once the ceremonies were over, and what the consequences might be if a mob ever got out of control.
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