Brooklyn Bridge

“ Before we talk of the trouble and labour, let us look for a moment at the great things the engineers have accomplished.
The Brooklyn bridge is five thousand eight hundred and eighty-nine feet long and eighty-five feet wide. The huge cables that support it stretch like the strands of a monster spider-web from the tops of two towers, each two hundred and seventy-six feet high and standing one thousand five hundred and ninety-five feet apart. ”

“ The bridge that frightens you most is the Brooklyn Bridge, and the bridge that frightens you least is the bridge in St. James's Park; for even if you are terrified by water in every form, as are too many boastful men, you must know, or can be told, that there is but a dampness of some inches in the sheet below. The longest bridge for boring one is the railway bridge across the Somme to St. Valery, whence Duke William started with a horseshoe mouth and very glum upon his doubtful adventure to invade these shores—but there was no bridge in his time. ”

“ Within a generation, the Brooklyn Bridge, a dream in the brain of a man, has spun its spider web of steel across the river, our buildings grown from four stories to towering castles of steel with their flag-staffs in the clouds. ”

“ On the left stretches far away the low-lying shore of New Jersey; on the right, Brooklyn can be seen, rising upwards, a broken line of roofs and steeples. Further away, joining “the city of churches” to Manhattan, hangs in mid-air that marvel of science, the triple carriage, foot, and rail road known as the Brooklyn bridge. Around the “Yosemite,” as she ploughs along towards her quay, throng many busy steamers, outstripping, in the race for port, fleets of sailing vessels that are beating up the broad reaches of the river before the autumn wind. ”

“ The development of the West has not belittled, but has enlarged New York, and Brooklyn will grow by reason of this Bridge, not at New York's expense, but to her permanent advantage. The Brooklyn of 1900 can hardly be guessed at from the city of to-day. The hand of Time is a mighty hand. To those who are privileged to live in sight of this noble structure every line of it should be eloquent with inspiration. Courage, enterprise, skill, faith, endurance—these are the qualities which have made the great Bridge, and these are the qualities which will make our city great and our people great. ”

“ The Brooklyn Bridge, swinging its web for immortal souls across sky and sea, comes nearer to being a work of art than almost anything we possess to-day, because it tells the truth, because it is the material form of a spiritual idea, because it is a sublime and beautiful expression of New York in the way that the Acropolis was a sublime and beautiful expression of Athens. ”

“ The East River being the locality for most of the foreign shipping, the bridges are at high elevations, the great Brooklyn Bridge, which crosses from City Hall Park, being one hundred and thirty-five feet above the water. Its massive piers are among the tallest structures about New York, rising two hundred and sixty-eight feet. This, the largest 70 suspension bridge in the world, was begun in 1870 and opened for traffic in 1885. ”

“ New York and night from the Brooklyn Bridge: The bees and fireflies flit and twinkle in their vast hives; curved clouds like the breath of gods hover between the towers and the moon. One hears the hiss of lightnings, the deep thunder of human things, and a fevered breathing as of some attendant and invincible Powers. The glow of burning millions melts outward into dim and fairy outlines until afar the liquid music born of rushing crowds drips like a benediction on the sea. ”

“ To the right hangs the great stretch of the Brooklyn Suspension Bridge, its slight curve very purely outlined with light; over it luminous trams, like shuttles of fire, are thrown across and across, continually weaving the stuff of human existence. ”

“ I mean the covered area at the New York end of Brooklyn Bridge where the transpontine electric cars, in an incessant stream, swoop down the curves of the bridge and sweep round on their return journey. The scene at night is indescribable. The air seems supersaturated with electricity, flashing and crackling on every hand. One has a sense of having strayed unwittingly into the midst of a miniature planetary system in full swing, with the boom of the trolleys, in their mazy courses, to represent the music of the spheres. ”

“ The Brooklyn bridge is the oldest of these and yet it has been bending to its superhuman task for barely thirty years. In these thirty years it has been constantly reconstructed—but the best devices of the engineers, doubling and tripling the facilities of the original structure, can hardly keep pace with the growth of the communities and the traffic it has to serve. So within these thirty years other bridges and two sets of tunnels have come to span the East river. But the work of the first of all man's highways to conquer the mighty water highway has hardly lessened. ”

“ Its length is twelve hundred feet, after the Brooklyn bridge the longest structure of the kind in the world, and it is the narrowest of those designed for carriage travel. To its narrowness it probably owed its safety from destruction during a fierce gale which occurred in the fall of 1869. The fastenings or dowels of several of the guys on the Canadian side were torn out, and the bridge at its center deflected down-stream more than its width, so that the surface of its road-way could not be seen half its length. ”

“ The designer of the Brooklyn Bridge has made a beautiful structure out of an exquisite refinement of utility, in a work in which the lines of forces constitute the structure. Where a more massive material forbade him to skeletonize the structure, and the lines of effort and resistance needed to be brought out by modelling, he has failed to bring them out, and his structure is only as impressive as it needs must be. ”

“ The item of $4,012,095 for Brooklyn Bridge changes and re-location of tracks is the same in each of the six plans, and includes the assessed values of the entire half blocks east of Adams Street. The re-location of the tracks on Adams Street will require a six track structure between the bridge and Myrtle Avenue and a three track structure between Myrtle Avenue and Fulton Street. Adams Street is not wide enough for so many tracks. The preponderating engineering opinion is that the city should not widen Adams Street,-14- but remove the structure to the half block east of Adams Street. ”

“ As certainly as thousands know that a structure called the Brooklyn Bridge exists, so upon testimony of the same validity do we know that "God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believed on him might not perish but have everlasting life." ”

“ If the architectural elements of the massive piers have perhaps too much the bare quality of engineering, if the pointed arches meet esthetic betrayal in [116] the flat solidity of the cornices, if, in short, the masonry does not sing as Richardson alone perhaps could have made it sing, the steel work itself makes up for this, by the architectural beauty of its pattern; so that beyond any other aspect of New York, I think, the Brooklyn Bridge has been a source of joy and inspiration to the artist. ”

“ We were on a level with the roadway of the bridge, and far below us spread the housetops of Brooklyn. Between our stone precipice and the iron street-end yawned a gulf that we drew back from, with water in its deepest bottom. Here the cables would be buried some day, sealed and cemented, piled over with masonry, to hold for centuries.
Standing in the lee of a block that kept off the wind, we looked across at the bridge, and planned how presently [183] we might reach it by skirting the moat-walls and drawing ourselves up at yonder corner where the end-span rested. ”

“ Gentlemen of the Trustees—With profound satisfaction, on behalf of the City of Brooklyn, I accept the completed Bridge. Fourteen times the earth has made its great march through the heavens since the work began. The vicissitudes of fourteen years have tried the courage and the faith of engineers and of people. At last we all rejoice in the signal triumph. The beautiful and stately structure fulfills the fondest hope. ”

“ At the southern end of this strait, near the point of its junction with New York Bay, is the narrowest part of its course, and it is here that it is crossed by the magnificent suspension bridge, known indifferently as the East River Bridge, or Brooklyn Bridge, which provides land communication between New York, with its population of two millions, and Brooklyn, the fourth city of the States in point of size, with inhabitants numbering about one million. Brooklyn is largely a residential place for persons whose daily business is in New York. ”

“ You can get your best idea of the number and magnitude of the skyscrapers from Brooklyn Bridge. The pedestrian in lower Manhattan passes from one shadowy canyon to another. He can well believe that these tall buildings will increase New York's office-capacity ten-fold to twenty-fold. Crowds never tire of watching the steel bridges set up on end and closed in with mere weather-curtains of brick and stone. But the most amazing part of the engineering work is far underground. ”

“ As the span increases, so that the dip makes the ropes impracticable, the land ends of the ropes are hoisted some distance above the roadway which they carry. If nothing can be found there strong enough to hold them, they are simply passed over, say, forked trees, and the ends made fast to other trees or held down with stones. This is the essential construction of the Brooklyn Bridge. The ropes become four cables sixteen inches thick, of 5541 steel wires; the forked tree becomes a tower 276 feet high, and 8260 square feet in area at the base ”

“ THE BROOKLYN BRIDGE Early in the fifties, when the Niagara accomplishment was more or less the talk of two continents and communication under seas by cable had helped to emphasize the possibilities of wire, John A. Roebling, protagonist of the wire bridge idea, advanced a proposal to connect New York and Long Island by a suspension bridge and release the people of Brooklyn from a segregation which they had made a somewhat futile pretense of enjoying. Habit dies hard. ”

“ If the city should acquire for public purposes the three blocks lying between Fulton Street and Liberty Street on the west and Washington Street on the east, it could widen Washington Street to the required width of 110 feet, use the space opposite the Post Office for one of the new buildings, and design the open space near the bridge as a dignified and fitting approach to Brooklyn Bridge, corresponding to some extent to the open space partly covered by the Manhattan municipal building at the other end. ”

“ The Bridge has not only been honestly built, but it may be safely asserted that it could not now be duplicated at the same cost. Much money might, however, have been saved if the work had not been delayed through want of means, and unnecessary obstacles interposed by mistaken public officials. Moreover, measured by its capacity, and the limitations imposed on its construction by its relation to the interests of traffic and navigation, it is the cheapest structure ever erected by the genius of man. ”

“ 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 the Brooklyn Bridge. What was grotesque and barbarous in industrialism was sloughed off in the great bridges. These avenues of communication are, paradoxically, the only enduring monuments that witness a period of uneasy industrial transition ”

“ No one can compute the loss of time ensuing daily from delays at the ferries to the multitudes crossing the stream. And time is not only money—it is opportunity. Brooklyn becomes available, henceforth, as a place of residence to thousands, to whom the ability to reach their places of business without interruption from fog and ice is of paramount importance. To all Brooklyn's present citizens a distinct boon is given. The certainty of communication with New York afforded by the Bridge is the fundamental benefit it confers. ”

“ They make it a habit to walk across the bridge on their way home in the evening, and they speak with great feeling of the beautiful effect when New York's high buildings flash into banked masses of flame in the falling dusk. People who live in Brooklyn take pride in keeping up old friendships and in dressing without ostentation. There are old gentlemen who use only the ferries in coming to New York, because they regard the bridges as a novelty open to the suspicion of being unsafe. ”

“ They stand as a menace to the improvement of Fulton Street north of Clark and if not removed will carry upon their rear walls billboards and signs which will mar the effect of the new bridge approach. If they are not removed the traveler, approaching Brooklyn by means of the Bridge cars, will have but a momentary glimpse of the improved plaza and the new municipal building as the train swings around into Adams Street. If, on the contrary, the buildings are removed the effect of the improvement will be noticed as soon as Sands Street is reached. ”

“ For one thing, the river is very broad; for another, the tall-masted ships ply up and down so frequently that it would never do to build anything which would obstruct their passage; and to overcome these difficulties would mean the expenditure of a vast sum of money. But the folk who earned their daily bread in New York and lived in Brooklyn grew thoroughly tired of spending chilly hours in foggy weather on the river-side piers, waiting for the ferry-boat to come and take them across, and at last they began an agitation which resulted in the Brooklyn Bridge. ”