The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

by David McCullough

  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 watch 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 especia
lly. 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.

  People had been getting onto the bridge for several months now, despite the precautions taken to stop them. One evening in April a mob of boys from New York had broken through the barriers at Chatham Street, crossed over the bridge, and started hurling rocks down on the houses near the Brooklyn tower. Police converged on them from both ends of the bridge and the boys had shinnied up the suspenders and climbed down under the flooring. “The officers used their clubs in an effective manner,” according to a newspaper account the following morning, “and soon cleared the structure of the roughs.” But the whole incident was a very dangerous sign Roebling said.

  There were other things he found annoying. He had been receiving inquiries, for example, from Abram Hewitt, who wanted help with his speech. In a letter written in early May (a letter in which Hewitt, or his secretary, misspelled Roebling’s name), Hewitt said he intended to take up “the social and political considerations involved in the creation of new avenues of transportation.” He wanted the engineer to send him “comparative examples of great engineering works, which would show that by scientific appliances the cost of the bridge is very much below what would be possible in any preceding age.” He wanted a table of wages from Roebling and other technical information. Hewitt planned to present the bridge as a symbol of progress.

  But the builder of the bridge did not see it that way. Or perhaps he was in no mood to be of any assistance to Abram Hewitt. In any event, Roebling’s answer went as follows:

  To build his pyramid Cheops packed some pounds of rice into the stomachs of innumerable Egyptians and Israelites. We today would pack some pounds of coal inside steam boilers to do the same thing, and this might be cited as an instance of the superiority of modern civilization over ancient brute force. But when referred to the sun, our true standard of reference, the comparison is naught, because to produce these few pounds of coal required a thousand times more solar energy than to produce the few pounds of rice. We are simply taking advantage of an accidental circumstance.

  It took Cheops twenty years to build his pyramid, but if he had had a lot of Trustees, contractors, and newspaper reporters to worry him, he might not have finished it by that time. The advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization.

  It was the sort of thing he had doubtless wished to say to Hewitt for quite some time and that he had somehow refrained from saying to the Union reporter. His concept of energy consumption was also well in advance of his time.

  A week or so later Hewitt wrote again to ask for the names of all those men he ought to “particularize” in his oration and for a brief explanation of what their individual contributions had been. This request Roebling willingly answered.

  For Emily it was as busy as any time since the bridge began. The reception would be all her doing. She had drawn up the guest list, decided on the design and wording of the invitation, commissioned the bust of her husband as well as an oil portrait, ordered flowers and bunting to decorate the house, planned her own entourage to attend the ceremonies, and did the best she could to protect her husband from any more last-minute nervous strain than was absolutely necessary. She was also making arrangements to vacate the house almost immediately after the reception. She had rented the house, starting in June. She, her son, and husband would return to Newport for the summer.

  The reception had been her idea. If her husband could not participate in the day Seth Low and the others were planning, then she would bring them to him—the trustees, the mayors, the Governor, the President of the United States.

  Her own party would ride in twenty-five carriages. She would be in the first of them, in the same victoria in which she had crossed the bridge. She would ride with her son, John A. Roebling, II. Following would be Ferdinand Roebling and his wife, Charles Roebling and his wife, Professor and Mrs. Methfessel, Emily’s brother William Warren from Washington, her sister-in-law Elvira Stewart, her sister, Mrs. Hook, and Eddie Roebling, now a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor living in New York. The rest were mostly personal friends.

  “I wish you would make one of my party of ladies to attend the public ceremony of opening the big bridge,” she wrote to a Mrs. William G. Wilson of New York. “I want the ladies to meet at my house at one o’clock on Thursday and go in a procession down to the bridge—sort of opposition to the Presidential procession on the New York side you know!

  “Wear short dresses and bonnet—as I shall even at the reception. I want you to help me receive after the public performance is over.”

  The mail arriving at the house was full of notes of congratulations and grateful acceptances for the reception. On May 18 came still one more letter to Roebling from Abram Hewitt. To the Chief Engineer it must have seemed one last absurd insult to end on. Hewitt had hoped to be able to pay his respects following the ceremony, he said. “But as I am to dine with the Mayor it is barely possible that the interval will not be sufficient, in which case I pray you and Mrs. Roebling to accept the will for the deed.” Then he said, “Will you kindly give me the full name of Mrs. Roebling…”

  On Saturday night, May 19, to test the lights before the opening day, the hidden dynamos were turned on, and people returning to Brooklyn by ferry between eleven and midnight were suddenly astonished to behold overhead a great display of light across the bridge from city to city. Whether they knew it or not, they were looking up at the future—steel and electricity.

  24

  The People’s Day

  A festival so unique New York has seldom seen…

  —Harper’s Weekly

  ESTIMATES were that fully fifty thousand people from out of town came into the city that morning by train But probably that many again were arriving by boat. The Mary Powell had all she could carry. A Fall River steamer that docked at eleven had six hundred passengers on board and the boat from Stonington had that number or more. One iron steamer from New Haven carried a thousand people. How many private boats and “special excursions” came into the harbor was anyone’s guess. By midday all the major hotels were sold out.

  The weather was perfect. “A fairer day for the ceremony could not have been chosen. The sky was cloudless, and the heat from the brightly shining sun was tempered by a cool breeze.” Countless flags snapped overhead all up and down Fifth Avenue and along Broadway, where the President was to pass. Buildings were draped in red, white, and blue, with banners and bunting floating from rooftops and window ledges, and most stores had some sort of display in their windows. In Madison Square, across from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where the President and several of his Cabinet had spent the night, thousands of people were waiting, milling about under the trees or walking round and round the enormous torch and hand of the Statue of Liberty, which had been brought up from Philadelphia after the close of the Centennial.

  At nine the fence across the Chatham Street entrance to the bridge had been torn down by workmen and replaced by a solid line of police. In another hour it was almost impossible to get within two blocks of the bridge. The streets leading to the river were packed solid with people. City Hall Park and Printing House Square were overrun. Every available rooftop and window was filled and along the river front there was scarcely a place left to stand.

  The huge wagons that hauled milk and produce into the city had arrived as usual during the night, but loaded instead with country people, as many as twenty to a wagon, and now with their sunburned faces and bewildered looks they stood out plainly in the sea of people. �
��One moment they were clambering clumsily up the sides of stoops or balancing themselves insecurely on fences, and next they were pushing their way, with half awe-struck faces, through the crowds in the gutter out into the street itself,” wrote a reporter. “The crowd impressed them with awe, the buildings and flags with admiration, but the consuming desire of their heart was to see the President, the Governor, and other political magnates.”

  There were as well, it seems, an abnormally large number of “symmetrical, shapely, graceful, elegant, neat, bright-eyed and comely women in brilliant costumes and resplendent colors,” and these remarkable creatures were “pushed, jostled, and inextricably mixed with ungainly, uncouth, and ill-favored women.” And in turn, they were all swayed back and forth and “jumbled up” with ragged men, with “rural swains” in frock coats and green ties, and with the unperturbed, self-contained New Yorker in dark suit and derby. “Embroidery, lace, fringe, trimmings and skirts were rent and torn by the friction of the crowd,” and the large corsages, which many of the women wore when they started out that morning, were, after a half hour’s experience in the crowd, crushed and torn to pieces. And everywhere, with or without adults in attendance, were “myriads of all sorts of children,” none of whom, for some miraculous reason or other, was trampled to death.

  Vendors hawked gumdrops, bananas, flags, pictures of John A. and Washington Roebling, bridge buttons and commemorative medals that sold for fifteen cents. It was a great day too for circulating all kinds of advertisements. Thousands upon thousands of pamphlets, fans, and handbills having the bridge as a decorative element or part of the text were handed out and tucked away in dresser drawers later on as mementos of the historic occasion. By noon, down by the bridge itself, the blue tickets issued by the Bridge Company were selling for five dollars apiece. Liquor stores and saloons were doing three times their normal business. And at the Police Gazette building a riot was under way. Better than a thousand “sporting men” having responded to publisher Richard Fox’s invitation, the place was packed to the rooftop. Already the “guests” had consumed several hundred bottles of champagne and whiskey, devoured a barbecued ox, and were busily smashing up the furniture for fun when the police arrived to clear the building.