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

by David McCullough

  To the surprise of almost everyone, he married again, that same year. She was a widow of about his own son’s age, Mrs. Cornelia Witsell Farrow of Charleston, South Carolina. How they happened to meet, when, or how long he had been contemplating marriage are all unclear. “…these relationships are those of the heart, not governed by reason or judgment,” he had written to John. “A second marriage late in life cannot be judged by the standard of the first because its motives are usually quite different.” John and the rest of the family heartily approved of the decision once he announced it, and of Mrs. Farrow, who, it was said, helped him “take a less gloomy view of things.” The Colonel even “became at times almost jovial.”

  He who had weathered everything just lived on interminably, forever “bearing up,” people said. His teeth were pulled, one by one, and in his letters to John he complained repeatedly of physical torment and in particular of excruciating pains in his jaw. He was seized with a terror of contracting tetanus and dying like his father. “And yet people say how well you look,” he wrote, “I feel like killing them.”

  In April 1912 his nephew and namesake, Washington A. Roebling, III, Charles Roebling’s son, went down on the Titanic and the family was news again. An editor of the New York Times wrote to ask if he would be good enough to explain, for the historical record, the part his mother had played in helping John A. Roebling build the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling wrote back, explaining patiently that he was the one who had built the bridge, not his father, and that it was Emily, not his mother, who had been associated “for fourteen long years with the various phases of the work.”

  When the income tax came along in 1913, it was as though the country was coming apart at the seams. “It means 100,000 spies to snoop into everybody’s business and affairs.” When war broke out in Europe he shuddered at the fate of mankind. “It has come to this pass, that for an extra German to live, he must kill somebody else to make room for him. We can all play at that game. It means perpetual universal war.”

  And still he carried on, writing long, affectionate letters to John, taking solitary walks down West State Street. “War in the kitchen as usual,” he reported to John in August of 1916. “The cook touched the laundress’s smoothing iron. War to the Knife, peace impossible—damages 5 strands of hair, 4 aprons torn, 2 scratches. Starvation threatens!” Somebody was watering his whiskey.

  His “oddities” became a favorite topic of conversation in Trenton. When he and Cornelia dined out at the homes of friends or one of his brothers, he would frequently proceed, without a word of explanation, to make himself comfortable on the nearest sofa and go fast asleep. He hated gloves and refused to wear them even in the coldest weather. He disliked automobiles intensely and refused ever to ride in one. Jigsaw puzzles became his “narcotic,” but never satisfied with those to be found in stores, which he considered much too easy, he had his specially made, from large photographs or reproductions of paintings, each puzzle with a thousand to three thousand pieces.

  He wrote his correspondence on anything at hand—a scrap of cheap note paper, the back of an old invitation, some stray bit of Emily’s stationery found in a bottom drawer. His handwriting, again as perfect as copperplate, was so small that most of his aged friends were unable to read it without a magnifying glass.

  When out on his walks he was known to step into a gateway or to appear suddenly fascinated by the contents of a store window if he thought he could avoid a conversation. The standard explanation locally was that the Roeblings were all a little odd that way, but the fact was that talking was often physically painful for him. Strangers were constantly stopping him on the street. Often a mother or father with a small boy in tow would ask if the boy might shake his hand and years later these same boys would remember him as “a nice, courteous old gentleman.” Among beggars and other Trenton people interested in charity he was known as a soft touch.

  There seems to have never been a day of his life in all the years following the bridge when he did not know some kind of physical discomfort or outright pain. Privately, like old men everywhere, he was preoccupied with his health, as well as material possessions he no longer had any use for.

  Nature remained his solace. He had planted a grove of Siberian crab apples behind the house. “Four have agreed to bloom one year,” he wrote, “and four the next year. How good they are.” He had also acquired a new companion, a rather disreputable-looking Airedale, a stray he named “Billy Sunday.” It became a common thing to see them come down the long drive as he set off on a walk, a small, fragile old gentleman in pinstripes and boater, advancing slowly, stiffly, the dog trailing at his heels. Or they would stand together in front of his tall iron gate waiting for the trolley. There was no regular stop there but the trolley stopped just the same and dog and master would climb aboard, everybody inside watching. As was widely known, Billy Sunday was the one dog in Trenton with a special pass to ride free on the trolleys. Once Roebling was seated, Billy would slip between his legs and curl up under the seat.

  Ferdinand Roebling died in 1917 and Charles the year after. Karl G. Roebling, Ferdinand’s oldest son, was named head of John A. Roebling’s Sons. But three years later Karl dropped dead on a golf course. Within days it was decided that there was only one person left who could possibly take charge of the vast industrial empire.

  The New York and Brooklyn papers made much of the announcement. “A little old soldier of eighty-four, Col. Washington A. Roebling, the man who built Brooklyn Bridge and the son of the man who planned it, is fighting today his last fight,” wrote the New York World, “is fighting to get his work done in spite of all his enemies—illness, debility, pain, loneliness, bereavement, the terrible depression of the man who has outlived his generation.”

  Roebling ran the company for the next five years and the business prospered exceedingly. “I claim a small part of this as the result of my management,” he confided to his son. Others credited him with more than a small part.

  He got up each morning at about seven thirty, had his breakfast, then, like the men in the mill, took the trolley to work, accompanied by his dog. His day was the full eight hours, the same as everyone. He had no secretary, preferring to handle his correspondence himself, which he wrote always in longhand. He was all but blind in one eye, almost totally deaf, and weighed perhaps 120 pounds. He looked so frail, so very old, like Lee in his final photographs, with the same snow-white beard and sunken eyes, that people wondered how in the world he could possibly manage, knowing, as most everybody did, what he had been through in his life. But the extraordinary thing is he did not simply manage. He was highly innovative, forceful, and seemed to know absolutely all there was to know about every facet of the business. He decided to change all the mills over to electric power, instead of steam, a momentous and costly move. An entirely new department for the electrolytic galvanizing of wire was set up under his direction and the contract for the cables of the Bear Mountain Bridge, over the Hudson River—among other bridges—was taken and completed during the time he was in charge.

  In one interview he was asked how he was able to carry on. “Because it’s all in my head,” he answered. “…It’s my job to carry the responsibility and you can’t desert your job. You can’t slink out of life or out of the work life lays on you.”

  In 1924 at the request of the Butler County Historical Association he sat down and wrote a detailed account of the early days of Saxonburg, and to a correspondent he wrote, “Long ago I ceased my endeavor to clear up the respective identities of myself and my father. Many people think I died in 1869.”

  The house next door was sold and torn down. Electric street lights were installed along West State Street. “The Great White Way in Trenton has come our way,” he wrote in despair. “Every 50 ft. will be installed a huge arc lamp to light up the front of the house and keep us from sleeping.” His own downward progress he described as accelerative, like gravity.

  In the spring of 1926 it was obvious to every one that he was
failing rapidly. By May he was down to less than a hundred pounds. “Think not that I am improving—growing weaker daily—body racks with pain—head bowed down in sheer apathy—bones crack when rolled over—fall down when I try to stand. Please leave me alone—and in peace,” he wrote to John’s wife. But then he added a P.S.: “A surprise: for several years—ten—a night-blooming cereus stalk has been knocked about in the greenhouse. Last night it suddenly bloomed, was brought to my bedside at 10 P.M. A delicate odor filled the room—a wonderful flower—much larger than a rose. A calyx filled with snow-white petals curved outward and oval-pointed. This morning it is gone—to sleep the sleep of ages again.”

  He lingered on for two more months. The only thing he had left, he said, was his brain and for that, he added, he was extremely grateful.

  He died peacefully at age eighty-nine, on July 21, 1926, with his wife, son, and several others at his bedside. There is no record of any last words being said. The end came at three thirty in the afternoon.

  All of the bridges built by John A. Roebling are gone now except two—the Cincinnati Bridge and an aqueduct over the Delaware built in 1848 above Port Jervis, New York, which has been converted into an automobile bridge and is the oldest suspension bridge in America. His house at Saxonburg still stands, however, as does the church he built there and a small shed in which the first reels of iron wire were stored. John A. Roebling’s Sons has since been sold to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.

  Washington Roebling’s house on West State Street was offered to the state of New Jersey to be used as the governor’s mansion, but the offer was declined because it was felt that the upkeep would be too costly. The house was torn down in 1946 to make room for a parking lot. The house at 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn has also been torn down. His mineral collection, which numbered some sixteen thousand pieces and included all but four of the known minerals on earth, was given by his son to the Smithsonian Institution.

  As he had requested, Roebling was buried at Cold Spring, beside Emily. No statues were put up in his honor. The graves were very plainly marked.

  In 1948 D. B. Steinman and his New York engineering firm were retained by the city to prepare plans to increase the highway capacity of the Brooklyn Bridge. With some fifty men assigned to the project, an extensive remodeling was carried out over a number of years. The trolley and el tracks were removed, the roadways were widened to three lanes in each direction, and additional trusswork was built. The changes, which cost more than nine million dollars, altered the over-all appearance of the bridge very little.

  In 1964 the bridge was officially declared a National Historic Landmark. It now carries more than 121,000 trucks and automobiles a day and on the average Sunday, in good weather, more than a thousand people go walking or bicycling on the promenade, which is still the only one of its kind. There are bronze plaques on both towers, beside the promenade, listing the names of John A. and Washington A. Roebling, the trustees, the assistant engineers, and the master mechanic. The plaques were put up when the bridge was first completed. In the time since, two more plaques, one for each tower, have been added to honor Emily Roebling.

  The towers themselves, though long since dwarfed by the skyline of downtown Manhattan, remain unique. Nothing to compare to them has been built in America. Since the towers of the mammoth suspension bridges built in the twentieth century are of steel, the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are both the first and the last monumental stone gateways on the North American continent.

  A combined force of some thirty men looks after the bridge. It gets a new coat of paint every five years or so and according to the engineers at the New York Department of Public Works, of all the bridges on the East River, it is the one that gives them the least trouble. With normal maintenance, say the engineers, the bridge will last another hundred years. If parts are replaced from time to time—even entire cables if necessary, which would be perfectly possible—then, “As far as we are concerned, it will last forever.” Perhaps it will.

  Appendix

  Brooklyn Bridge Vital Statistics*

  Chronology of Construction

  Notes

  The following abbreviations have been used throughout these notes:

  JAR: John A. Roebling

  WAR: Washington A. Roebling

  EWR: Emily Warren Roebling

  JAR II: John A. Roebling II

  HCM: Henry Cruse Murphy

  LER: Laws and Engineer’s Reports

  RUL: Rutgers University Library

  RPI: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

  LIH: Long Island Historical Society

  ASCE: American Society of Civil Engineers

  For further details on the books cited, the reader is referred to the Bibliography.

  PART ONE

  1 The Plan

  “The shapes arise!”: Whitman, Sound of the Broad-Axe.

  Meetings with the consultants: Minutes kept by WAR. RPI.

  Biographical sketches of the consultants: National Cyclopedia of American Biography, Dictionary of American Biography, and memorial tributes published by the ASCE.

  “If there is to be a bridge”: Barnard, “The Brooklyn Bridge.”

  1867 charter: An Act to incorporate the New York Bridge Company. Chapter 399. Passed April 16, 1867. LER, pp. 3-7.

  JAR’s formal proposal of 1867 was officially titled Report of John A. Roebling, C.E., to the President and Directors of the New York Bridge Company, on the Proposed East River Bridge. LER. Most of the descriptive material concerning the proposed bridge has been drawn from this report, which was published in 1870 but which appeared first in the Eagle, September 10, 1867.

  Brooklyn interest in the bridge: Virtually every Brooklyn publication had something good to say for the bridge. The new and short-lived Brooklyn Monthly, for example, was nearly as enthusiastic as Roebling, saying in its issue for May 1869, “When it is finished, the East River Bridge will, without comparison, be the grandest monument of its kind on this continent, if not in the world…”

  “As the great flow of civilization”: JAR, Report of John A. Roebling, C.E. LER.

  “Lines of steamers, such as the world never saw before”: Ibid.

  “Lo, Soul, seest thou not God’s purpose”: Whitman, Passage to India.

  “Singing my days”: Ibid.

  “The completed work, when constructed in accordance with my designs”: JAR in a covering letter for his report, addressed to the President and Directors of the New York Bridge Company, September 1, 1867. LER.

  Navy engineer’s plan for East River dam: Brooklyn Union, January 7, 1869.

  New York Polytechnic Society sessions: Reported in various issues of the Eagle, February 1869.

  Another bridge and a tunnel besides: Brooklyn Union, December 22, 1869.

  “A force at rest”: Scientific American, Vol. XII, 1865.

  Congressional legislation: An Act to establish a bridge across the East River. Public, No. 53. Approved by Congress March 3, 1869. LER.

  The make-up of the Bridge Party: Thomas Kinsella in the Eagle, April 16, 1869; also a reminder book kept by WAR, RUL.

  2 Man of Iron

  “We may affirm absolutely…without passion”: Bartlett, Familiar Quotations.

  “A wet bandage around the neck”; “A full cold bath every day”: Two small JAR notebooks on the water cure, dated 1852. RPI.

  Man of iron…poised…confident: Various obituaries and contemporary biographical sketches; also a speech delivered by Henry D. Estabrook at the unveiling of JAR’s statue, June 30, 1908, RUL.

  “…Never known to give in”: Eagle, July 26, 1869.

  “One of his strongest moral traits”: Stuart, Lives and Works of Civil and Military Engineers of America, p. 325.

  “Sir, you are keeping me waiting”: Ibid., p. 81.

  Christoph Polycarpus and Friederike Dorothea Roebling: Ibid., p. 9.

  Hegel’s favorite pupil: Ibid., p. 12.

  “It is a land of hope”: Hegel, Lectures on the P
hilosophy of History, London, 1890.

  “…the heart of him into cold storage”: Henry D. Estabrook at the unveiling of JAR’s statue, June 30, 1908. RUL. Estabrook was uncommonly candid about his long-deceased subject. His source appears to have been WAR.

  Nothing could be accomplished without an army of functionaries: JAR, Diary of My Journey from Muehlhausen in Thuringia via Bremen to the United States of America in the Year 1831, p. 113.

  Cash gift for Mühlhausen: Schuyler, The Roeblings, p. 15.

  The description for JAR’s voyage to America is drawn entirely from his Diary of My Journey.

  Six thousand dollars in cash: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg, p. 7.

  Trunkful of books: Most of these volumes are in the RPI collection.

  “If one earnestly desires it”: JAR, Diary of My Journey, pp. 18—19.

  “…a cheerful carefree disposition”: Ibid., p. 54.

  “…the one perceives in the foam”: Ibid., p. 57.

  The founding of Saxonburg: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg; JAR, “Letters to Ferdinand Baehr, 1831.”

  Saxonburg as “the future center of the universe”: WAR to JAR II, winter 1893-94. RUL.

  “My father would have made a good advertising agent”: WAR, Early History of Saxonburg, p. 11.

  “…no unbearable taxes”: JAR “Letters to Ferdinand Baehr, 1831.”

  “…valuable attribute of industry…They have made good farmers”: History of Butler County, Pennsylvania, p. 289.