The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  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 American 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.

  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 was doing a bust for the opening ceremonies and he was feeling a little tired just now.

  When the reporter inquired for the C
olonel’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.’”