Engineers of Dreams: Great Bridge Builders and the Spanning of America

by Henry Petroski

  7

  When the Manhattan Bridge opened, a fourth crossing of the East River was also under construction, one that in years past had actively been referred to as the second East River crossing. It was to connect the boroughs of Queens and Manhattan in the vicinity of Blackwell’s Island, now called Roosevelt Island, which provided dry land for midriver piers. However, even though great suspension spans would not be required, the realization of a Blackwell’s Island Bridge was also a long and arduous process. A suspension bridge was actually proposed as early as 1838, and in 1867 a structure was authorized, but nothing much happened until 1872, when the “scheme was rescued from impending oblivion” by the formation of a bridge company with William Steinway, the piano manufacturer, as president. Financial hard times derailed the project for a while, and it was not resumed in earnest until the late 1870s, when Steinway gave up the presidency of the New York and Long Island Bridge Company to Dr. Thomas Rainey, a native of North Carolina who had become successful operating steamships between New York and South America, and whose title was believed to be self-proclaimed. As was often the case with such projects, the business, manufacturing, and real-estate interests would ultimately form partnerships with the engineering interests to bring the bridge to fruition.

  An 1838 proposal for a bridge at Blackwell’s Island (photo credit 4.22)

  Steinway and other Long Island property owners had a clear economic interest in supporting a bridge between New York and Long Island, but they obviously did not have the experience to oversee its design and construction. Though Rainey was willing to devote his time and energy to such an endeavor, he did not have engineering experience or judgment, and so early structural plans were not very satisfactory. The bridge was projected to have piers on the northern end of Blackwell’s Island and thus enter Manhattan at about 77th Street. The total length of the bridge was to be about two miles, and access where it crossed high above the New York avenues was to be “by enormous passenger elevators like those in use in first-class hotels.” Not having to construct long suspended spans would keep the cost of the bridge under $5 million, and the great number of tolls collected would give a handsome return on investment, which for the Long Island investors would be in addition to the increased value of their real estate. The legality of running railroad tracks across the bridge was challenged; by 1893, amid financial hard times, only one pier had been constructed, and the project once more lay dormant, ultimately to be abandoned.

  An 1881 proposal for a “second bridge over the East River,” at Blackwell’s Island (photo credit 4.23)

  In 1894, the company proposed a new cantilever bridge with major spans over the two river channels and over Blackwell’s Island itself. The new location was to be more southerly, so that Manhattan approaches would be between 62nd and 63rd streets, and chief engineer Charles M. Jacobs expected it could be ready for traffic in 1897. Though the bridge’s 846-foot channel spans would be modest by Firth of Forth standards, the proposed bridge would have the second-longest cantilever spans in the world, and twice as many tracks as the Forth Bridge as well as two driveways. A contract was awarded early in 1895, but later that year the Supreme Court ruled against allowing railroad traffic across the bridge, and so the project was again thwarted. The idea of a Blackwell’s Island bridge was revitalized in 1898, after the creation of a consolidated New York City, by its first mayor, Robert C. Van Wyck.

  In his first report as bridge commissioner in 1902, Lindenthal announced that the plans for a Blackwell’s Island bridge had been changed to give a narrower roadway and to provide for access to Blackwell’s Island itself, on which the city Departments of Charities and of Corrections both maintained institutions, and hence the later name of Welfare Island. Lindenthal’s new plans, revealed a year later, called for two large cantilever spans, of 1,182 feet and 984 feet, which, unlike the Firth of Forth spans, would not incorporate suspended portions. Though this created some complications in design calculations, the outline of the bridge had a more continuous top curve, and was defined below by a flat roadway, thus giving the structure somewhat the appearance of a suspension bridge—the distinctly different genre with which it would often be confused. Lindenthal’s specifications also called for the use of nickel steel in the eyebars and pins in the upper chord, to assure ductile rather than brittle behavior; this would be the first bridge to use so much of that material.

  Blackwell’s Island Bridge, 1903 design (photo credit 4.24)

  Unlike the Manhattan Bridge, Lindenthal’s Blackwell’s Island structure was built essentially as it had been designed when he left office. A steel strike in 1905 did delay the beginning of construction, but the “largest cantilever bridge in the United States” was begun in earnest in 1906, with a projected cost of $18 million, 50 percent higher than originally estimated. Later that year, lightning struck a section under construction “and so weakened it that two or three heavy gusts of wind brought the whole piece smashing to the ground,” but that was nothing compared with what happened in Canada in 1907.

  After the collapse of the contemporary cantilever under construction at Quebec, there was naturally some concern for the stability of the one over Blackwell’s Island. Work gangs at the New York construction site were pitted against each other in competition to close overhanging sections of the bridge before the March gales began. It was not only the forces of nature that were feared, however; on one occasion, dynamite was found where an explosion would have brought down the incomplete central span, and union opposition to the open-shop project was suspected. In spite of all this, in March 1908, the last link in the superstructure was completed, and what had “seemed to be defying the law of gravity” was then reported to look “perfectly safe.”

  Regardless of how safe the bridge looked to reporters, Scientific American raised the concern that changes had been made to Lindenthal’s plans and so perhaps introduced weaknesses not unlike those that had brought down the Quebec Bridge. Two independent consultants, Professor William H. Burr of Columbia University, one of the experts who had been appointed to consider a suspension bridge across the Hudson, and the New York engineering firm of Boller & Hodge, were called upon “to examine and report upon the design and structure” of the bridge at Blackwell’s Island. Though they raised some caveats, involving the weight of steel in the bridge and the load it should be allowed to carry, the consultants found no reason to think that the bridge was in imminent danger of collapse. Burr did recommend full-scale tests of compression members, and Lindenthal concurred, saying that the bridge “must not be opened for public use until the strength of its compression members has been proved by actual test.” The Quebec failure had changed the focus entirely from concerns over eyebar tension members to built-up compression members, and engineers knew that there had never been conclusive tests of the theories they employed. Burr also urged removal of some of what he considered excess steel in the bridge before letting it carry elevated railroad tracks. In effect, he argued, the bridge was straining more to hold itself up than it was supposed to under the weight of regulated rapid-transit cars.

  In the meantime, construction crews continued to work on the bridge, connecting it up with the approaches in August, and fearless pedestrians immediately began to enjoy the mile walk between Queens and Manhattan. When it came to the attention of a reporter that ducks, pigeons, and swallows roosted nightly on the structure, and in such large flocks that they could chase away threatening cats, newspaper headlines declared that the birds were vouching for the strength of the bridge. The authorities cited in support of this idea ranged from Rudyard Kipling, who had written about bridge builders, to ornithologists, who were reported to have said that “birds in large flocks will not settle on a weak structure.” While criticism continued in the technical press, the popular press was reassuring the public that “architects and structural engineers are among the few persons who will always do their work just as well as they can possibly do it, irrespective of whether they make any money out of the
job or not.”

  Sometimes the name of a bridge and its formal opening generate more interest than its safety. Real-estate interests in Queens objected to the name Blackwell’s Island Bridge because they considered it a misnomer, and one that was “unpleasantly suggestive of a penal institution and a poor-house,” which occupied the island. Amid some protest that there was a plot among Irish Americans to obliterate “from the map of the United States all names of places of English origin,” the name Queensboro Bridge was in the end accepted. With that settled, attention could focus on planning the week-long festivities that would open the bridge in June 1909. Planning began well in advance, but not everything went according to plan.

  Early in the year, it was announced that the “Bridge Queen-to-Be” had disappeared. Miss Elinor Dolbert was a French-born eighteen-year-old clerk in the Bloomingdale Brothers department store, who had been discovered to be a “fine vocalist” after she sang at a concert given by the Bloomingdale Mutual Aid Society. She astonished the large audience, and “was encored so many times that she fainted from the stress.” Since the young singer became famous throughout the store, she was asked to sing for “the firm,” who “decided to have her voice tested.” When several voice teachers confirmed that she did indeed have a fine voice, lacking only in “voice culture,” the Bloomingdale company “resolved to defray the expense of the cultivation of Miss Dolbert’s voice.”

  All the while, the Queensboro Celebration Committee, with which Samuel J. Bloomingdale himself may have been influential, was looking for someone to sing the song written expressly for the big day. After an audition, Miss Dolbert was selected to be “Queen of the Bridge,” but only from the Manhattan side; the rivalry across the river was presumably too great to expect agreement in matters of voice and beauty. An entertainment was scheduled by the Bloomingdale Mutual Aid Society to raise money for a wardrobe and pin money for Miss Dolbert, but it was called off when she disappeared. As far as was known, she “had no love affairs,” and it was speculated that the young lady, “to whom fortune was being kind,” had simply “run away from good fortune.” In the hope that someone might recognize her, a description was printed in the newspaper: “She is about 5 feet 6 inches in height, and has a mass of golden hair, and large black eyes. She wore a black cheviot tailor-made suit, the collar and cuffs of the jacket trimmed with black velvet, a jaunty black hat, with a single ostrich plume, and a bow of black velvet ribbons, a black lynx fur boa, tan gloves and tan shoes.” Although it is difficult to imagine her lost in a crowd, Miss Dolbert seems never to have been found; the bridge show, however, had to go on.

  If Miss Dolbert could not sing on the bridge, perhaps Wilbur Wright could fly around it. Not to be outdone by the Hudson-Fulton memorial-exhibition planners, who announced a $10,000 prize for an airship flight between New York and Albany, the bridge-celebration committee announced similar prizes for airplane and dirigible-balloon contests in conjunction with their festival in Long Island City. While they were waiting to hear from Wright, the committee also let it be known that they were negotiating with Roy Knabenshue, who three years earlier had circled the Times Building in his airship, to scatter leaflets entitling the finders to participate in a drawing for 250 lots in Queens.

  The “veracious press agent employed by the Queensboro Bridge Celebration Committee” also let the newspapers know that 235 people had applied for permission to jump off the bridge on the day of its opening. The applications had been analyzed, and they were reported to be classified as follows:

  Professional high divers 168

  Freaks, employing inventions to break their fall 34

  Would-be suicides 9

  Unemployed 24

  —

  Total 235

  The would-be suicides were identified as young women, who gave “unrequited love, unhappy matrimonial experiences, and a struggle for existence” as reasons they wanted to jump off the bridge. The unemployed were all men, hoping to land a job. One of them reasoned that if he survived he would get a good position, and if he did not survive he would not need work, and it could be “given to some other unfortunate.” In the final analysis, no applications were approved, and no bridge jumping was to be allowed at the celebration.

  Although the formal opening ceremonies were to be held the week of June 12, the mayor, bridge commissioner, and bridge engineers drove across the structure in late March and opened it to public traffic. Questions of safety had been relegated to closing paragraphs in newspaper stories about the planned festivities, and the thirty-seven survivors of the Committee of Forty, prominent businessmen who had promoted the bridge, made their plans to cross the structure as a group. They decided to engage a fife-and-drum corps to lead their march, after which they would have dinner at Strack’s Casino, in Astoria, where they had met 133 times during their now successful campaign to have the bridge built.

  A more clandestine first crossing took place one morning in May, when Dr. Rainey, “shorn of his wealth and enfeebled by age and ill-health,” left his home on Lexington Avenue and all alone walked across the bridge. His own bridge, which he had spent twenty-five years and almost a million dollars promoting, was never to be. According to the report in The New York Times, headed, “Sees His Dream Bridge,”

  Dr. Rainey is nearly 85 years old, and made a pathetic figure as he shuffled along, his steps feeble and uncertain, his former towering frame shrunk and bent. He wore a pair of house slippers, a soft cap, and a sack-coat, and had no overcoat.…

  “This is my bridge,” said the doctor as he wiped away the tears that trickled down his withered cheeks. “At least it is the child of my thought, of my long years of arduous toil and sacrifice. Just over there,” pointing to a ruined heap of stone along the river front, “are the old towers of my bridge, which I began to build many years ago. I spent all I owned on the project, and then New York, with all its great wealth and power, came in and took away my possessions, and now in my old age I am left in ill health and alone to eke out my remaining days.

  “It is a grand bridge,” he said, “much greater than the one I had in mind. It will be of great service to thousands in the years to come, when Dr. Rainey and his bridge projects will long have been gathered into the archives of the past.”

  A tablet was planned for the new bridge, to commemorate Rainey’s efforts and dream. Among those on the committee arranging for it were Charles H. Steinway and Samuel J. Bloomingdale. The official bridge-opening ceremonies took place in June, as planned. About a quarter of a million onlookers strained to hear speeches in the early afternoon and would gawk to see the “new bridge ablaze with red fire and electricity in the evening.” Before that, however, and just before the parade approached the reviewing stand, Dr. Rainey was introduced as “the father of the Queensboro Bridge idea” and received a rousing cheer.

  8

  Gustav Lindenthal had no such prominent acknowledgment at the Queensboro Bridge ceremonies, if he was there at all; his thoughts were again with railroads, not with pedestrians. Since 1904, he had been engaged as a consultant for a project to connect the tracks of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which included those of the Long Island Railroad, with the New York, New Haven & Hartford Railroad, thus enabling continuous rail traffic to flow from Long Island and New England into Manhattan and from there westward through the Pennsylvania Railroad’s tunnels under the Hudson River, which had obviated the need for Lindenthal’s North River Bridge, at least for that line. The new project involved a three-mile-long steel viaduct that would cross the East River about three miles north of the Queensboro Bridge in a sinuous curve that passed from Long Island over a treacherous channel known as Hell Gate, over Ward’s Island, across Little Hell Gate, over Randall’s Island, and finally across the Bronx Kills into the northernmost borough of New York City. The centerpiece of Lindenthal’s plan was to be a steel arch on the order of one thousand feet between abutments, the largest arch bridge in the world, and it would carry four railroad tracks. By 1907, he had progressed fa
r enough with the design that it could be submitted to the Art Commission.

  As with all great projects, the chief engineer required assistance for its detailed design and supervision. Among those Lindenthal enlisted to help him were Othmar Ammann, a young Swiss-born engineer who had worked for the Pennsylvania Steel Company, which built the Queensboro Bridge, and who had participated in the investigation of the collapse of the Quebec Bridge. Ammann was to serve as principal assistant engineer on the Hell Gate project; his story will be told more fully in the next chapter. Another of Lindenthal’s assistants on the Hell Gate was to be New York-born David Steinman, who was very nearly exactly Ammann’s contemporary, and whose story also requires a chapter of its own. In addition to engineering help, Lindenthal early on sought the assistance of Henry F. Hornbostel, then a young consulting architect, who had studied at Columbia and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and who would go on to design the campuses of the Carnegie Institute of Technology, in Pittsburgh, and Emory University, in Atlanta. Though Hornbostel had been retained by Commissioner Lindenthal to help with the Manhattan Bridge, he had been dismissed by the succeeding administration when he refused to submit new plans unless he received additional compensation for his services. Hornbostel’s main contribution to Lindenthal’s Hell Gate Bridge was to be the addition of “a pair of immense pylons” of granite topped by concrete that framed the arch and its entrances.

  The concept of a railroad link with a bridge across Hell Gate as its single most significant structure was created in 1892 by Oliver W. Barnes, an engineer with extensive railroad experience and Pennsylvania Railroad connections, and Lindenthal, who then saw the plan as part of a greater scheme that included his North River Bridge. The New York Connecting Railroad Company was incorporated that same year to construct a steam railroad about ten miles in length with termini “in Westchester County, east of the Bronx River, and in the City of Brooklyn.” Among those involved in the incorporation with Barnes was Alfred P. Boller, an 1861 graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who had most recently worked on various projects in and around New York. It was Boller who had worked out the first plans for a bridge at Hell Gate—a cantilever design—in 1900. At that time, the Pennsylvania Railroad was leaning toward a scheme that had Lindenthal’s North River Bridge bringing rail traffic from New Jersey into Manhattan, which would from there connect to the Long Island Railroad through the Steinway Tunnel, named after the president of the tunnel company for which Barnes served as chief engineer, and ultimately linking up with New England through the Hell Gate connection. Pennsylvania Railroad President Alexander J. Cassatt, brother of the painter Mary Cassatt, subscribed to the scheme, but with more affordable and exclusive tunnels under the Hudson River instead of a great common bridge over it. Vice-President Samuel Rae was to be made president of the New York Connecting Railroad, which by then the Pennsylvania had acquired. When Lindenthal’s term as bridge commissioner ended, Rae appointed him to direct the Hell Gate project as consulting engineer and bridge architect, a title he must have relished.