The Bridge

“Babylon had her hanging gardens, Egypt her pyramids, Athens her Acropolis, Rome her Athenaeum; so Brooklyn has her Bridge.”

–Sign from a Brooklyn store window.

125 years ago today, the first of many New York feet walked upon the Brooklyn Bridge. Fittingly, the feet for this feat belonged to Emily Roebling, though officially only the daughter-in-law of the Bridge’s designer, no person was more crucial in getting the bridge built than Emily and, as a testament to this great city’s more unfortunate tendencies, no person received less credit. Her father in-law, John Roebling, was a engineer known for several other bridges in the US. He was the first to propose, and the only person to believe, that a suspension bridge could be built over the famously turbulent East River. However, while surveying the site for his bridge, he got badly injured in a ferry accident and died from tetanus a few weeks later, leaving the plans for this improbable structure to his son, Washington. But, as if over zealousness ran in this unfortunate family, the younger Roebling spent too much time using compressed air to work on the pillars and quickly developed decompression sickness (The Bends). And so it fell to his wife, Emily, to run the construction site and see the bridge through; which she did, while learning engineering in her spare time.

John Roebling was not the construction’s only fatality. 25 nameless immigrant workers, mostly of Irish and German ethnicity, died while building the bridge that would serve as a major link between their countrymen and a better life in the open frontier of Brooklyn. But however it got built, it did get built and was opened on May 24th, 1883 while schools and businesses in both Brooklyn and Manhattan were closed for what became a giant celebration of New York’s strength, ingenuity, and triumph over turbulent waters–both in the river and in the city itself.

But there was yet one more death to be caused by the bridge: Just fifteen years later, in 1898, The (former) City of Brooklyn ceased to exist as the independent entity it had once been and, after a highly contentious vote, merged with Manhattan to form The City Of Greater New York (Now just called New York City).

The is no way to measure the impact that the bridge has had on New York. The New York City of 1883 is a foreign land. While the bridge’s pillars were once the tallest structures in the Western Hemisphere, in their shadow have since been built massive skyscrapers; giant towers have dwarfed them and then the dust from their destruction have covered it. Similar bridges throughout the world have long been deemed weak and unsafe, taken down, and rebuilt anew. But our Bridge still stands. Certainly, in part, this has to do with the strength of the East River’s sediment, but also, perhaps, with the strength of our city and with the determination of the many people who have walked on it, speaking every tongue and from every part of the globe, in search of a better life.

It’s not beautiful, was never meant to be, and is certainly no Hanging Gardens. But it turned a big city into a great city. A city that still fills outsiders with awe and residents with pride. As does the Bridge.