The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  And then, tragically, on Thursday, May 31, a week to the day after the bridge was opened, the very thing Roebling had warned against happened.

  It was Memorial Day, a holiday in both cities, and the weather was ideal. There had been thousands on the bridge all morning. But C. C. Martin had allowed pedestrian traffic on both carriageways and that had taken pressure off the promenade until some time near three thirty when the crowds began to build rapidly. Probably twenty thousand people were on the bridge by four, or the approximate time of the panic. When it was all over, twelve people had been trampled to death.

  The trouble began at the top of a narrow flight of stairs leading to the promenade at the end of the New York approach. A crowd pressing up the stairs was running head on into another crowd coming in the opposite direction, from the New York tower. There were fifteen steps in all, broken into two flights by a landing just seven feet wide. When the two oncoming throngs met there, it was virtually impossible for anyone to move either way and people approaching from behind, in both directions, kept trying to shove their way forward.

  But from what several eyewitnesses said later, it seems some sort of order might have been restored had not a woman coming down the stairway lost her footing. Another woman began to scream at the top of her lungs and there was an immediate rush to see what was happening. Those who were packed onto the stairway tried desperately to hold back the crowd but it was impossible. In an instant three or four more lost their balance and fell. Meanwhile, the crowds farther back on the promenade kept advancing, nobody knowing what was going on up ahead, and in a moment the whole stairway was packed with dead and dying men, women, and children. People were shrieking and screaming and those who suddenly found themselves at the brink of the stairway and saw what was happening turned to shout for those behind to move back, but then they too lost their step and went over on top of the trampled bodies below. The most terrifying crush was on the promenade just back from the top of the stairs. Numerous people had their clothes torn off. In places, it was reported, people were jammed so tight that blood oozed from their noses and ears.

  Hats, umbrellas, gloves, shoes, loose change, fell between the bridge train tracks and rained down on the housetops and streets below. Among a group of boys playing in the streets was Al Smith. “That was my first view of a great calamity,” he said later. “I did not sleep for nights.”

  Other explanations would be given later. It would be said that somebody out in the middle of the bridge began to scream that it was falling. It would be said a gang of “roughs” from New York had started pushing and shoving people. Probably there is some truth to both accounts.

  Lawsuits as a result of the accident added up to half a million dollars, but no negligence was proved. A coroner’s jury reprimanded the Bridge Company for the narrowness of the stairway and for employing too few police. The Bridge Company blamed the newspapers for having created an “undefined feeling of insecurity” about the bridge, but promptly doubled the number of police on the promenade.

  C. C. Martin remained in charge. He was officially named Chief Engineer on July 9, 1883, after Roebling had submitted his formal resignation, and he would hold that job until 1902, devoting, in all, thirty-three years of his life to the bridge.

  Martin’s full force for operating and maintaining the bridge was comparable in size to that needed for a large ship or fair-sized factory of the day. He had one assistant engineer, a chief mechanical engineer, who had charge of the steam engines and rope traction, three assistant mechanical engineers, three oilers, and three firemen. There were six locomotive engineers, six locomotive firemen, one master of transportation, forty-five conductors, a superintendent of tolls, nineteen collectors, one trainmaster, four train dispatchers, four yardmen, and five switchmen. A master machinist had charge of the machine shop and locomotives. There were two blacksmiths, a foreman of carpenters with “a force of men changing with the exigencies of the work,” a foreman of car repairs and inspector of grips, a foreman of labor and general work, one captain of police, one sergeant, three roundsmen, and eighty-six policemen. Counting Martin, the grand total came to 201 full-time employees.

  The bridge trains began running in September and worked to perfection. By the time it was a year old 37,000 people a day were using the bridge, or very nearly as many people as fourteen ferries were handling the year it was begun. In their first full year of service the bridge trains carried 9,234,690 passengers, but then the completion of the Brooklyn Elevated to Fulton Ferry more than doubled the patronage. In 1885 the bridge trains handled nearly twenty million passengers. The trains ran twenty-four hours a day and by 1888, just five years after the bridge was built, they were handling more than thirty million passengers a year. The terminals were expanded, more cars were put into service. Furthermore, the ferries were still in business, to the surprise of people, and would be for a long time to come. The last Brooklyn ferry, between Hamilton Avenue and the Battery, stopped running on June 30, 1942.

  In May of 1884, P. T. Barnum, “in the interest of the dear public,” took a herd of twenty-one elephants, including the famous “Jumbo,” over the bridge to Brooklyn and thereupon declared that he, too, was now perfectly satisfied as to the solidity of the masterpiece.

  And inevitably, perhaps, there were certain individuals who would see the bridge as a challenge to their manhood or as a means of doing away with themselves. The bridge was scarcely in full operating order before they began leaping from it, for glory or oblivion, and frequently with the unintended result.

  The first to try for glory was Robert E. Odium, a brawny swimming instructor from Washington, D.C. On May 19, 1885, to divert the bridge police who were waiting to stop him, Odium sent a friend onto the bridge to go through the motions of jumping. Then he came riding up in a closed carriage, stepped out, climbed onto the railing, and, dressed in trunks and a bright-red swimming shirt, jumped to his death, with one arm thrust straight over his head, the other clamped firmly to his side.

  Steve Brodie, the only man ever to become famous for jumping from the bridge, probably never did. He was a personable, unemployed Irishman in his early twenties, who, not long after Odlum’s much publicized failure, began boasting that he would be the next to jump. Bets were made along the Bowery, but just when Brodie intended to jump remained a mystery. Then on July 23, 1886, it was announced he had done it and lived to tell the tale. Several friends said they had been witnesses, that they had watched him plummet straight into the river, where he was picked up by a passing barge. But nobody else had seen his jump and it was commonly said among the skeptics, of whom there were a great many, that a dummy had been dropped from the bridge and that Brodie merely swam out from shore in time to surface beside the passing barge.

  Brodie was put in jail briefly for his supposed feat, then opened a saloon that became a favorite Bowery stop for sight-seers and slumming parties. In the main barroom hung a large oil painting of the bridge and there for all to see was Brodie plunging toward the water. For further historical documentation, there was a framed affidavit from the barge captain who claimed to have rescued the hero.

  But Steve Brodie’s jump from the Brooklyn Bridge would be fixed forever in the public imagination by a play called On the Bowery, which opened in 1894. Brodie was the star and his big scene was a leap from the bridge, done with all sorts of elaborate special effects, only this time it was to save the girl, who had been thrown off by the villain. The play was a smash hit and eventually toured the country. A bridge sweeper sang a moral ballad, Brodie sang “My Pearl’s a Bowery Girl!” (“My Poil’s a Bowery Goil!”) and, for encores, a song called “The Bowery,” written for an earlier production, which became a standard part of every performance.

  Brodie became rich and famous, but died of diabetes at age thirty-six or thereabouts, in 1901. For years after his celebrated jump people kept asking him why he did not do it again, only this time with reliable witnesses. His answer was always the same: “I done it oncet.”
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br />   Others kept on trying. Larry Donovan, a pressman at the Police Gazette, was the first to jump successfully. He went over the side wearing a red shirt like Odlum and a pair of baseball shoes. In 1887 James Martin, a painter’s assistant on the bridge, fell off and lived and the following year a young man named Byrnes jumped to impress his girl friend and he too lived. In 1892 Francis McCarey jumped and was killed, but it seems that was what he wanted, so probably he ought to be considered the first suicide.

  Then there was a man who jumped wearing a derby hat and was still wearing it when he surfaced in the river quite unharmed and another man who went off wearing immense canvas wings. He sailed a thousand feet upstream before landing safely on the water. But by the turn of the century the jumping craze had ended.

  The bridge remained a subject of endless fascination for almost everybody who saw it. For the millions of immigrants arriving in New York through the 1880’s and 1890’s and on into the new century, it was one of the first things to be seen of the New World as they came up the bay. It was one of the landmarks they all looked for, the great world-famous symbol of the faith that was literally moving mountains. And the fact that it had been designed by an immigrant and built largely by immigrant workers did much naturally to enhance its appeal.

  In truth there is really no end to the number of things the bridge meant to people. For whole generations growing up in New York and Brooklyn it was simply a large, dominant, and generally beloved part of the natural order of things. The river without the bridge or Brooklyn without the bridge would have been unthinkable and year after year people went to it on especially fine days, or at moments of personal stress or joy, the way people go to a mountain or walk beside the sea.

  For countless people their first walk on the bridge would remain one of childhood’s earliest memories. Countless others would tell how it was the place where they fell in love. No doubt it very often was. Al Smith was among those who loved to sing “Danny by My Side,” the opening line of which runs “The Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday is known as lovers’ lane.”

  In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the most popular of the many novels to be written with a Brooklyn setting, a young World War I soldier from Pennsylvania says, “I thought if ever I got to New York, I’d like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.” It was something felt by whole generations of Americans before and since. They would come from every part of the country, take photographs of it and from it with one of the new Kodak cameras introduced not long after the bridge was finished, or buy some of the stereopticon views that sold by the millions. They would ride bicycles across, take honeymoon strolls by moonlight, carry newborn babies proudly down the promenade, or scatter the ashes of the dearly departed from the middle of the main span.

  It was a place to go on stifling summer evenings, to take some exercise to and from work, to walk the baby, to watch the gulls, to find relief from the city. Its promenade was and would remain one of the most exhilarating walks on the continent. To be on the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge on a fine day, about halfway between the two towers, looking over the harbor and the city skyline, was to be at one of the two or three most soul-stirring spots in America, like standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon.

  Just why this bridge, more than all others, has had such a hold on people is very hard to pin down. But in the years since it opened it has been the subject of more paintings, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and photographs than any man-made structure in America. There are probably a thousand paintings and lithographs of the bridge by well-known artists alone. * It has been the setting for scenes in films, for Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, and for all kinds of advertising. (It would seem that a whole chronological display of female fashions in America, since the advent of photography, could be assembled just from pictures posed on the bridge year after year.) It has been used repeatedly on postcards, Christmas cards, book jackets, posters, record jackets. It has been the symbol for a New York television network and for a popular Italian chewing gum.

  There have been songs about the bridge, besides the one Al Smith liked, and a great many poems, nearly all of which have been less than memorable. The one notable exception is The Bridge by Hart Crane, who, in the 1920’s, to identify as closely as possible with his subject, moved into Washington Roebling’s old house at 110 Columbia Heights. In Crane’s powerful but not altogether coherent masterpiece, the bridge is seen as a shining symbol of affirmation at the end of an epic search through the American past. It is the “Tall Vision-of-the Voyage,” spare, “silver-paced,” and all-redeeming.

  The finest thing written at the time the bridge was opened appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The author was a newspaperman named Montgomery Schuyler and his article, “The Bridge as a Monument,” was not only the first critical review of the great work, but a bugle call, as Lewis Mumford would say, for serious architectural criticism in America. Schuyler did not think much of the bridge as a work of art. Still, everything considered, he judged it “one of the greatest and most characteristic” structures of his century. “It so happens,” he wrote, “that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”

  The towers, he believed, would outlast everything else on either shore, and he asked his readers to imagine some future archaeologist surveying the ruins of New York, “a mastless river and a dispeopled land.” The cables and roadway would have long since disintegrated, he said. The Roeblings would be as forgotten as the builders of the Pyramids. Only the towers of the Great Bridge would remain standing and the archaeologist would have “no other means of reconstructing our civilization.” “What will his judgment of us be?”

  Henry James, writing soon after the turn of the century, would see something darkly ominous in the looming silhouette of the bridge and its shuttling trains. New York for him had become a “steel-souled machine room,” the end product of which was “merciless multiplications” and the bridge was a “monstrous organism,” marking the beginning of a new age. For James the prospect was chilling.

  By the 1920’s, however, the bridge was a unique source of “joy and inspiration” for the critic Lewis Mumford.

  The stone plays against the steel; the heavy granite in compression, the spidery steel in tension. In this structure, the architecture of the past, massive and protective, meets the architecture of the future, light, aerial, open to sunlight, an architecture of voids rather than solids.

  The bridge proved, he said, that industrialism need not be synonymous with ugliness. It was something done exceedingly well by Victorian America. “All that the age had just cause for pride in—its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible—came to a head in Brooklyn Bridge.”

  Others, later, would see it as a symbol of liberation, of release from the “howling chaos” on either shore. It would be said that at heart it was a monumental embodiment of the open road, the highway call, the abiding rootlessness that runs in the American grain—“not so much linking places as leaving them and shooting untrammeled across the sky.” And an age that can no longer regard it as an engineering marvel has declared it a work of art. One prominent contemporary American architect has gone so far as to say it is one of the two works of architecture in New York of any real importance, the other one being Central Park.

  It has also, of course, been taken quite for granted by millions who use it regularly and quite sentimentally by some. It can be seen as merely one of a number of different ways to get to or from Brooklyn or as the grandest sort of memento of a New York that was, a serene, aspiring emblem rising out of an exhilarating and confident age too often remembered solely for its corruption and gimcrackery. It can be seen as the beginning of modern New York—of monumental scale, of structural steel—or the end of old Brooklyn. It is all these. A
nd possibly its enduring appeal may rest on its physical solidity and permanence, the very reverse of rootlessness. It says, perhaps, as does nothing else built by Americans before or since, that we had come to stay.

  For Brooklyn, on a more practical level, it did everything its proponents had promised. It stimulated growth, raised property values, and provided a safe, reliable alternative to the ferries. It put Brooklyn on the map.

  Rush hours at the terminals were like nothing ever witnessed before, not even at the old Fulton Ferry slip in Brooklyn, not even on the uptown platforms of New York’s elevated trains. Certainly there was little semblance of the smooth, efficient transfer of humanity that John A. Roebling had pictured. But the bridge also withstood the Blizzard of 1888; it carried trolley cars, along with everything else, when they were installed on the carriageways and elevated trains when they replaced the cable cars. It accommodated ever greater numbers of people year by year. But it was not enough.

  In 1903 the Williamsburg Bridge was completed upstream from the Navy Yard, from designs by an RPI man with the old Brooklyn name of Leffert Lefferts Buck. Heavy, ungainly-looking, built entirely of steel with a stiffening truss no less than forty feet deep, it was four and a half feet longer than the Brooklyn Bridge, which meant it was now the world’s largest suspension bridge. One of the assistant engineers was C. C. Martin’s son, Kingsley Martin, and the cables were of Roebling wire. Wilhelm Hildenbrand and Charles Roebling were in charge of the cable making.

  Six years later, when the Brooklyn Bridge was handling half a million people a day, two more bridges were finished. The Manhattan, another suspension bridge, was built almost side by side with the Brooklyn Bridge, just upstream. The Queensboro Bridge, a cantilever, took a route John A. Roebling once considered, over Blackwell’s (now Welfare) Island.

  More than a dozen tunnels were built beneath the river for subways, railroads, water lines, and automobiles. * And for these reasons primarily Brooklyn changed beyond anyone’s imagining.