The Great Bridge

by David McCullough

  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. And 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.

  In 1898 with a population of nearly a million people and still the third-largest city in the United States, Brooklyn had relinquished its independence to become a borough of New York. By 1930 Brooklyn’s population was greater than that of Manhattan. Old Brooklyn families had become an infinitesimal minority, the Heights a tiny picturesque but inconsequential segment of a Brooklyn that spread over eighty-nine square miles, or four times the area of Manhattan. Even the name Brooklyn became synonymous with things never heard of before the turn of the century—the Dodgers, Murder Incorporated—and the butt of innumerable jokes. One favorite vaudeville remark about the bridge went, “All that trouble, just to get to Brooklyn.”

  In 1931 the George Washington Bridge was completed over the Hudson with a span more than twice that of the Brooklyn Bridge and six years later the Golden Gate Bridge, larger and still more awesome, was built at the opposite end of the continent. By contrast to such gleaming creations, the Brooklyn Bridge seemed an antique and there was even talk of tearing it down.

  In 1944 the elevated trains stopped running over the bridge and the old iron terminal buildings were dismantled. A team of engineers began a painstaking examination of the entire structure to see what ought to be done about it. When they had concluded their studies two years later, it was announced that all the bridge needed was a new coat of paint.

  Washington Roebling did not live to see the bridge eclipsed by the George Washington or Golden Gate Bridges, both of which were built with Roebling wire, but he came very close to it. Ironically—incredibly—the crippled, tormented legendary Chief Engineer lived on until 1926. He outlasted them all—Hewitt and Seth Low, each of whom became mayor of New York; Stranahan, who lived to be ninety and to see a statue of himself put up in Prospect Park; Kingsley, who died only a few years after the bridge was built, of a nervous stomach at age fifty-two; Eads, who died in 1887, while trying to enlist support for a fantastic ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; Slocum, whose name would be remembered for one
of the worst disasters in American history, the burning, in 1904, of the General Slocum, a New York excursion steamer; and every one of the assistant engineers, each of whom, except for Martin, went his own separate way professionally once the bridge was finished.

  On the night Seth Low was defeated for re-election as mayor of New York, Roebling came up from Trenton to watch the returns in front of the Herald building and was very pleased by the results. But all he ever said for attribution concerning the old management of the bridge was that so far as he knew no money had ever been stolen—a decidedly different conclusion, of course, from what he said in his private notes years before. His exact statement, written at age seventy-eight, in a letter to an old friend then compiling a Trenton history, was this: “So far as I know not a dollar was stolen politically or otherwise. There was no thievery—no political robbery or peculation. In spite of the assertions of all the newspapers to the contrary. It is the unscrupulous press that makes most of the trouble.”

  He seems to have kept in touch with his former assistants over the years. McNulty named a son after him and Hildenbrand did a good deal of engineering work for John A. Roebling’s Sons. Hildenbrand, in fact, had quite a life after he left Brooklyn. He built the Pikes Peak Railway in Colorado, directed the complete renovation of the Ohio River bridge at Cincinnati, and built a suspension bridge of his own, of about the same span as the Ohio River bridge, at Mapimi, Mexico. Not long after Hildenbrand died, in 1908, Roebling wrote, “Soon I will be the last leaf on the tree.”

  For four years after the completion of the bridge, he and Emily lived in Troy, in order to be near their son, who was then at Rensselaer. Roebling spent his time quietly. Often the old pains and cramps returned with a vengeance and he felt himself a “used-up man.” Still the sustained separation from both the bridge and the wire business seemed to be what was needed. His health improved gradually but steadily.

  In the spring of 1888, when his son was graduated, the three of them moved back to Trenton. John went to work at the mill and was married the following year. In the meantime, plans were drawn up, to Emily’s specifications, for a “commodious mansion in the Tudor style,” which Roebling had built for her on West State Street, on grounds sloping down to the Delaware River. The house took several years to finish. It was a great baronial affair of huge gables and towering brick chimneys, and on the street side there was a big stained-glass rendition of the Brooklyn Bridge, complete with clouds sailing by and ships passing below. At night, all lit up, this window was considered one of Trenton’s “sights” and for years people went out of their way to see it.

  They moved in in 1892. She bought the most expensive carriages and the finest horses, which she insisted always on driving herself, her coachman seated behind her. For a number of years she seems to have had quite a good time. She entertained often and beautifully to judge by some old clippings from the Trenton society columns. She became active in women’s clubs. She studied law at New York University and received her degree. She worked on a book about Cold Spring. * She went to Europe twice. The first time they went together, but the second time, in 1896, she went without him and to Russia as well, where she was one of the few Americans present at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra. A formal photograph of Emily Roebling in the dress she wore to the coronation shows an erect, confident-looking woman in her early fifties, a little stout but rather regal herself in silvery white satin.

  From Roebling’s correspondence during these years, one gets a picture of him living in semiseclusion, privately very proud of her accomplishments, absorbed in all manner of interests—his mineral collection, his greenhouse, bird-watching, astronomy, the paleontological history of New Jersey. He also wrote a two-hundred-page biography of his father, which he misplaced and which was never found, most unfortunately. His one recreation was riding the trolleys, which he seems to have enjoyed enormously, riding out into the nearby countryside to look for wild flowers. And these he could identify and refer to by their Latin names as readily as a trained botanist.

  When he felt well enough, he traveled with her—to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, to Martha’s Vineyard, which he liked, to Nantucket, which he did not, and to New York, where they went out on the bridge together unnoticed.

  He read Schiller and Goethe, Carlyle’s six-volume Frederick the Great, which he had read before as a young man, and Tolstoy, his favorite. He followed the stock market and made a very great deal of money at it.

  He also kept an attentive eye on the wire business, in which he was again a major stockholder, but drew no salary. He liked to take his lunch at the office, which was the old family home long since so built over and swallowed up by the mills that it was barely identifiable. He was always available for his opinion and his opinion carried some weight apparently. Once when his brothers were all for selling out to U. S. Steel, he said no and that was that. But his relations with his brothers were always strained. Ferdinand was so bothered by the grand new house when it was first finished that he refused to enter it. For two years Ferdinand and he did not speak.

  His one male confidant was his son, but communication with him had to be carried on by mail. John had lasted only a short time in the wire business. It is impossible to tell just what went wrong. The official explanation was that John had retired because of his health. But it was commonly said in Trenton that family affections and loyalties (if there were any) stopped at the door of the Roebling works. If a young man did not measure up inside, or if there were personality conflicts, then he departed rapidly, even if his name was Roebling.

  Years before, Edmund Roebling, youngest of old John’s sons, had been unable to get along with Ferdinand and was “kicked out,” according to Washington Roebling. “He was now adrift with too much money, became a globe-trotter, and was somewhat dissipated.” Edmund never returned to Trenton, never married, lived on in seclusion on the Upper West Side of New York.

  Emily’s health began to fail about the time the new century began. It would be said later that the strain of her experiences in Brooklyn was the principal cause. Her eyes gave her trouble at first and she took to wearing dark glasses. In the fall of 1902 Roebling went into Roosevelt Hospital in New York for some intestinal surgery and in early December, in Trenton, while he was still recuperating, she had a collapse of some sort. The doctors said she had stomach ulcers and were not encouraging. He kept going back and forth to Trenton from the hospital, a torturous trip for him, to be with her for a day or two at a time.

  An additional night nurse was hired in early February. He was home to stay by then and joked with her about renaming the house Roebling Hospital. Though pitifully weak, she refused to give up and announced she would go to the mineral baths at Sharon Springs, New York. But she never did. She died of cancer of the stomach on February 28, 1903, and was buried at Cold Spring. He was too weak to make the trip.

  In the file of Roebling’s letters kept by his son there is an envelope marked “Undated notes, clippings, etc, found among W.A.R.’s papers after his death.” Among the items in the envelope is a much-worn paper on which Roebling had copied in pencil an epitaph Mark Twain inscribed on the grave of his daughter:

  Warm Summer Sun shine kindly here

  Warm Summer Wind blow softly here

  Green Sod above, lie light, lie light

  Good night, Dear heart, good night, good night.

  For five years after Emily’s death he lived alone with the house and servants. The wire business in this time became the biggest in the world. The demand seemed unending—for telegraph wire, baling wire, electrical wire, for wire cloth, for bridge cable wire, for the construction of the Panama Canal, for wire rope for cable roads, coal mines, ships, oil rigs, logging machinery, tramways, elevators. The Otis Elevator Company was buying nearly all its cable from the Roeblings. The sons of John A. Roebling had become millionaires many times over. Washington Roebling’s own estate would be approximately $29 million.

  On fall
afternoons in 1904, in Kinkora, New Jersey, a tiny village on the Delaware ten miles below Trenton, he watched the building of a new mill complex and an entire town of brick houses and broad streets that was to become known eventually as Roebling. His brothers had announced that the town was being built only out of “plain business necessity” and that there was to be nothing utopian about it. But to the surprise of very few, it turned out to be one of the best-planned industrial towns ever built in America, a model in every respect, as company towns went. In the view of many old admirers of the family, it was a fitting extension of ideas that had spurred John Roebling on at Saxonburg so many years before.

  The memory of his father remained a looming presence for Roebling. Confusion over which one of them had built the Brooklyn Bridge became increasingly common as the years passed and for him a sore subject. Time was cheating him out of everything, he lamented, even his identity. When the family decided to erect a larger-than-life-size statue of the old man and the sculptor said the few photographs on hand were not suitable, Roebling agreed to pose. He sat several times, his head turned as though studying some distant horizon, a sheaf of plans on one knee. When the finished bronze was unveiled with much to-do in Trenton’s Cadwalader Park in 1908, a great many people came up to tell him how much it looked like him.