The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  About the time Stranahan finished introducing Hewitt, a shaft of sunlight had fallen on the Presidential head and neck, whereupon an Army officer appeared from somewhere with a lady’s parasol, which he held over the portly Arthur until the close of the exercises. The World, now a Democratic paper, said he looked like an Asiatic potentate under the parasol.

  It was also remarked that Abram Hewitt looked pale and rather “delicate” when he got up to speak, and by the time he finished, the audience had grown tired and extremely restless. But then the final speaker, the Reverend Dr. Storrs, was standing where Hewitt had been, a handsome, vibrant figure with flowing gray locks, who obviously felt at home before such a vast assembly and who punctuated every sentence with a nod, from the waist up, as if driving home each statement with his forehead. Storrs spoke for nearly an hour.

  All told, the speeches, prayers, and cornet solos ran to nearly three hours and the Bridge Company’s gold-embossed commemorative booklet containing the full text of everything said runs to 122 pages. Neither Chester Arthur nor Grover Cleveland said a word from the rostrum; they had not been asked to speak nor did anyone expect them to. They were there as honored guests only, to watch and listen and enjoy themselves. Nor did anyone make any public mention of the Queen’s birthday.

  Hewitt’s address would be generally regarded in retrospect as the most successful of the day and was probably the finest he ever gave. He himself liked it so much that he had it published as a pamphlet three years later for his mayoralty campaign against Henry George and Theodore Roosevelt. But every speaker that afternoon seemed to be saying that the opening of the bridge was a national event, that it was a triumph of human effort, and that it somehow marked a turning point. It was the beginning of something new, and although none of them appeared very sure what was going to be, they were confident it would be an improvement over the past and present.

  Henry Murphy, the assistant engineers, “the humblest workman,” were all praised by one speaker or another and Kingsley, Seth Low, and Hewitt each in his way extolled the genius of the Roeblings. Hewitt compared John A. Roebling to Leonardo da Vinci but said Colonel Roebling was an even greater engineer than his father. Then he solemnly declared that the name of Emily Warren Roebling, a name he had not been quite sure of the week before, would be forever “inseparably associated with all that is admirable in human nature, and with all that is wonderful in the constructive world of art.”

  Hewitt said, too, that he could vouch for the manner in which all bridge business had been conducted, that no money had been stolen by Tweed, that the whole money raised had been “honestly expended,” which was the part of his speech that drew the warmest response from those up front and on the platform. And disregarding, or perhaps misunderstanding, Roebling’s skeptical remarks about progress since the Pyramids, he compared the $2.50 day’s pay of the average bridge worker with the wage scale of ancient Egypt, which he figured at two cents a day in 1883 money. That in Hewitt’s view was real progress. The bridge was a vindication, a heroic and monumental end result of modern industrialism, of labor and capital, of democracy, of new “methods, tools and laws of force”—of the nineteenth century. Even the Times, never an admirer of Abraham Hewitt, liked this part of his speech.

  But it was the neatly combed little valedictorian, Seth Low, who came closer than anyone that day to expressing what was probably everyone’s most deeply felt response to the bridge. “The beautiful and stately structure fulfills the fondest hope,” he said. “…The impression upon the visitor is one of astonishment that grows with every visit. No one who has been upon it can ever forget it…. Not one shall see it and not feel prouder to be a man.”

  The Chief Engineer had sat alone at his window, his field glasses trained on the bridge, watching the procession until the last top-hatted figures at the tag end passed beneath the arches of the Brooklyn tower. Then he had stretched out on his bed for a rest. Sometime near four Emily had returned, having left the Sands Street terminal midway through the speeches. He put on a Prince Albert coat and went downstairs on her arm, to the front parlor, where they took a seat on the sofa and waited for the first guests to arrive. But it was nearly five thirty before President Arthur alighted from a carriage at the canvas canopy outside. The crowd in the street by then was such that the police were just able to keep a narrow path open to the door.

  The house was decorated as if for a wedding. Both mantels in the drawing room were banked with red and white roses, wisteria, white lilacs, and in the center were clusters of calla lilies. On either side of the folding doors was a huge shield of roses. There were more roses and lilacs in gilt baskets and vases of cut flowers distributed through every room. And the balustrade on the stairway was trimmed with smilax all the way to the top floor.

  There were busts of both the Chief Engineer and his father standing on one drawing-room mantel. On the elder Roebling’s white marble head Emily had placed a wreath of immortelles, while the one of her husband wore a laurel wreath decorated with tiny American flags and a white satin ribbon on which she had had printed in red and blue: “Chief Engineer Washington A. Roebling, May 24, 1883. Brooklyn Bridge. Let him who has won it bear the palm.”

  A band was playing on a balcony above the drawing room, on the river side of the house, and through the doors beneath the balcony, out in the garden overlooking the river, stood a grand marquee and long tables of food and refreshments.

  Emily and Washington Roebling stood side by side, just inside the parlor door, as the President and Seth Low entered the room together. “The engineer was pale, but he showed no excitement,” one observer noted. She was dressed in heavy black silk, trimmed in crepe, with a knot of violets in her belt. She was described by the papers as beautiful and vivacious.

  It was said the President warmly congratulated the engineer as they shook hands. After that people kept pressing through the door in great numbers. In all there were more than a thousand guests, including Grover Cleveland, the two mayors, all the speakers of the day (Abram Hewitt did make an appearance, after all), Mr. and Mrs. William C. Kingsley, General and Mrs. Henry Slocum, Stranahan and his wife, all the other trustees and wives, the assistant engineers, Ferdinand and Charles Roebling and their wives, Elvira Stewart, Professor and Mrs. Methfessel, Moses Beach from next door, Simeon Chittenden, Henry Pierrepont, A. S. Barnes, William Sellers of the Edge Moor Iron Company, Ludwig Semler, former Mayor Grace, Judge McCue, Hamilton Fish, William Evarts, Congressman Flower, and the Reverend and Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher.

  Roebling remained standing only ten minutes or so, then went back to the sofa, where he sat, not saying much, Emily beside him. The President meanwhile gave all the appearance of having a splendid time. He tapped his foot to the band music, admired the flowers, went out into the garden, shook a great many hands, and stayed perhaps an hour in all. Once he was gone, Roebling excused himself and there was a burst of applause as he went slowly back up the stairs. The reception lasted another hour or more after that, but for Roebling his first and last ceremonial duty as Chief Engineer was over.

  Everyone on both sides of the river was waiting for dark. Those whose job it was to describe the scene in words went to great lengths to do it justice. One reporter who was out on the bridge wrote that the innumerable boats and ships on the river looked like a sleeping city. Another man who was also on the bridge wrote this:

  As the sun went down the scene from the bridge was beautiful. It had been a perfect day. Up and down on either side of New York the bright blue water lay gently rippling, while to the south it merged into the great bay and disappeared toward the sea. The vast cities spread away on both sides. Beyond rolled the hilly country until it was lost in the mists of the sky. All up and down the harbor the shipping, piers, and buildings were still gaily decorated. On the housetops of both Brooklyn and New York were multitudes of people…

  The great buildings in New York loomed up black as ink against the brilliant background of the sky. The New York bridge pier looke
d somber and gloomy as night. But in Brooklyn the blaze of the dying sun bathed everything gold. The great building looked like burnished brass…the west the sun sent its last tribute to the bridge in a series of great bars of golden light that shot up fanlike into the blue sky. Gradually the gold melted away, leaving the heavens cloudless. The sky was a light blue in the west, but grew darker as it rose, until it sank behind Brooklyn in a deep-sea blue.

  Slowly the extremities of the twin cities began to grow indistinct…. The towers of Brooklyn lost their golden hue. They seemed to sink slowly into the city itself. In New York the outlines of the huge buildings became wavering and indistinct.

  Then one by one the series of electric lights on the bridge leaped up until the chain was made from Brooklyn to New York. Dot by dot flashes of electric lights sprang up in the upper part of New York. The two great burners at Madison and Union Squares flared up, and the dome of the Post Office in New York set a circlet of diamonds out against the relief of the sky. The streets of the two cities sparkled into life like the jets on a limitless theatrical chandelier, and the windows of the houses popped into notice hundreds at a time. Long strings of lanterns were run over the rigging of the shipping in the harbor, and red and green port and starboard lights seemed numberless. The steamers sped to and fro on the water, leaving long ripples of white foam, which glistened in the light like silver.

  In Brooklyn every public building was ablaze with gaslight. The Music Academy had a gas-jet rendition of the bridge out front. Houses draped with Chinese lanterns looked like Christmas trees. There were strings of lanterns over Montague Street and a block over, on Pierrepont, the Historical Society windows were lighted with hundreds of candles. Columbia Heights was nearly as bright as day with gaslights, lanterns, candles. Simeon Chittenden had a big sign in front of his house done in gas jets—“Welcome to Brooklyn’s Guests”—but as the President was driven past later in the evening, a gust of wind blew out half the letters.

  Every street on the Heights looked like a carnival. Indeed the crowds in both cities were far greater now than at any time earlier in the day. No traffic was moving anywhere near the river. Uptown New York and the inland sections of Brooklyn were all but deserted. Where there had been a hundred people watching by the river during the day, now there were a thousand, or at least so it seemed. The Times estimated there were 150,000 people just in the neighborhood of City Hall.

  Suddenly a solitary rocket shot into the sky over Columbia Heights and burst into a spray of blue stars. It had come from the mayor’s house, where the dinner for the President had been going on.

  Almost instantly the lights on the bridge went out. For a moment not a thing could be seen of it. Then there was a long, distant hissing sound, a sudden roar, and fifty rockets exploded simultaneously high over the main span of the bridge, while at least twenty bombs burst higher still, from above the towers, and poured down great showers of gold and silver. “From an elevated point the city seemed to be in volcanic action, with the spouting crater on the suspension bridge.”

  At its final meeting on May 14, as its last official act, the Executive Committee of the Bridge Company had contracted with the New York firm of Detwiller & Street, Pyrotechnists, to put on a display of fireworks “worthy of the place and the occasion.” In all, fourteen tons of fireworks—more than ten thousand pieces—were set off from the bridge.

  It lasted a solid hour. There was not a moment’s letup. One meteoric burst followed another. Rockets went off hundreds at a time and were seen from as far away as Montclair, New Jersey. Bombs exploded incessantly above the towers, bathing the bridge in red. In the strange light, firemen on the bridge could be seen in strong silhouette and the water from their hoses looked like molten silver. Meantime, innumerable gas balloons were being sent aloft. They were fifty feet in circumference and loaded with fireworks and as they swung into the sky, one by one, they scattered balls of colored fire over the river.

  At each burst of a rocket a huge roar went up from the shores. Hundreds of thousands of people were watching—probably the biggest crowd ever gathered in New York until that time—and nobody, in all his days, had ever seen anything like this.

  Nearly every boat on the water was making some sort of noise or display. Rockets and fireworks were shooting up from the middle of the river and down the bay. On one big excursion steamer, ablaze with lights, a calliope was shrieking out “America.” Bands were playing on board other boats.

  Rockets were going up all over New York meantime—and in Brooklyn. From the middle of the bridge now came great thunderclap reports as zinc balls, fired from mortars, burst five hundred feet up, fairly illuminating the two cities, like sustained lightning.

  And finally, at nine, as the display on the bridge ended with one incredible barrage—five hundred rockets fired all at once—every whistle and horn on the river joined in. The rockets “broke into millions of stars and a shower of golden rain which descended upon the bridge and the river.” Bells were rung, gongs were beaten, men and women yelled themselves hoarse, musicians blew themselves red in the face. And then when it was all over and nearly quiet again and the boats on the river were beginning to untangle themselves, there was one last memorable touch that not even Detwiller & Street, Pyrotechnists, could have arranged. “Hardly had the last falling spark died out,” wrote an editor who had been watching from the top of the Tribune Building, “when the moon rose slowly over the further tower and sent a broad beam like a benediction across the river.”

  The grand reception for the President at the Music Academy, which began almost immediately after the fireworks, was considered a great success. The President, Grover Cleveland, William Kingsley, General Slocum, and twenty or thirty others stood on the stage, surrounded by a small forest of potted palms, while the people of Brooklyn were permitted to pass by and pay their respects. The procession lasted until ten. Arthur was in fine humor still, bowing, smiling, playing his part exactly as everybody would have wanted him to. And one member of his Cabinet was heard to remark, “Why I thought that Brooklyn had one hotel and a shipyard or two, but it’s quite a town.”

  It had been announced in advance that the bridge would be thrown open to the public at the stroke of midnight and that anyone might cross upon payment of one cent. Enormous crowds had gathered at both ends.

  At eleven twenty two young men with blond mustaches raised the windows of the Brooklyn toll booths and H. R. Van Keuren—a good Brooklyn name, reporters decided—was the first to put his money in the box. The first lady to cross was a Mrs. C. G. Peck of Baltic Street. The first vehicle from the Brooklyn side was an old-fashioned top-wagon drawn by a bony white horse whose large white hooves came down on the bridge floor with a noise like the discharge of musketry. The driver was a Charles Overton from Coney Island, who had been waiting at the gate for two hours and who also managed to make the first trip across from the New York side, since the gates there opened ten to fifteen minutes later than those in Brooklyn.

  A fierce struggle ensued at the New York gates, characteristically, and perhaps it was altogether appropriate that the first man through was the Keeper of the City Hall. Once he was beyond the gate, there was an even more violent rush from behind. Police began swinging their clubs and several people had been rather roughly treated by the time the whole crowd—perhaps three thousand people—was strung out in along orderly line.

  People poured across the bridge through the entire night and were still coming with the first light in the sky. According to a count kept by the Times, the first beggar to cross came over from Brooklyn, as did the first drunk, the first policeman, the first hearse (which was empty), the first “dude,” the first Negro, and the first musician, a Scottish bagpiper who marched over playing “The Campbells Are Coming.”

  How late the Chief Engineer and his wife stayed up watching from their window, who may have been with them during the evening, what they said to each other, or what reflections went unsaid as bombs and rockets burst over the bridge,
can only be guessed at.

  In another time and in what would seem another world, on a day when two young men were walking on the moon, a very old woman on Long Island would tell reporters that the public excitement over the feat was not so much compared to what she had seen “on the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  Epilogue

  FOR NEARLY fifty years after it was completed the Brooklyn Bridge reigned supreme as the most magnificent, if not technically the largest, suspension bridge on earth.

  In its initial days as a public thoroughfare it was commonly referred to as “The Eighth Wonder of the World” and it was an even greater sensation than anyone had expected. On its first full day, May 25, 1883, a total of 150,300 people crossed on foot and 1,800 vehicles went over carrying an unknown number of others. The following day, a Saturday, the count was down. But on Sunday, May 27, a spectacular spring day, 163,500 people went “strolling” on the Great Bridge. One veteran New York policeman said he had never in all his experience seen such crowds. “It seems to me as if the people have got the bridge craze,” he said.