The Great Bridge Page 12

  Once a ferry had landed and its passengers were ashore, the loading gates at the ferryhouse swung open and the waiting room emptied with a sudden rush of clerks and shop girls, day laborers with dinner pails, butchers, storekeepers, delivery boys, bankers, and business people. Outside, the street swarmed with more crowds coming and going, with vendors, dock workers, carriages, carts, farm wagons, and the clanging Fulton Street horsecars. It had been a long time now since the ferry captains and ticket boys knew their regular passengers by sight. One New Yorker who visited Brooklyn and went away quite impressed by the place also commented that he would just as soon stay in New York if living in Brooklyn meant riding on an East River ferry.

  Upstream from the ferry slip and the spot where the colossal bridge tower was to rise were the Catherine Street Ferry; the Navy Yard, at Wallabout Bay; the Havemeyers and Elders sugar refinery, which on foggy mornings looked like a great Rhenish castle at the water’s edge; the Roosevelt Street Ferry; and Brooklyn’s famous old shipyards. Henry Steer’s and Webb & Bell were builders of clipper ships before the war. At Samuel Sneeden’s the Swedish genius Ericsson had built the Monitor.

  Generally speaking, the East River was considered the best part of the harbor of New York. It had deeper water for wharves than along the Hudson, or North River, as it was also known; it was less affected by prevailing winds, a little less troubled by ice. It was also the safest, most desirable place to build or repair ships and for this reason the Roebling bridge was still a bone of contention along the river. With the yards on the New York side taken into account, the shores of the East River represented one of the greatest concentrations of shipbuilding anywhere on earth.

  Downstream from the ferry the waterfront ran beneath the brow of the Heights, on past Red Hook Point, clear around to Gowanus Bay. All told Brooklyn had nearly eight miles of piers, dry docks, grain elevators, and warehouses. The new Atlantic Basin, on Buttermilk Channel, was forty acres in area. More ships tied up in Brooklyn now than in New York and Hoboken combined. From the river the city looked as though it were enclosed behind a protective screen of ship masts and rigging. The sea lanes of the world ended at Brooklyn, an admirer of the city would write years later, but it was as true in 1869, and it was the sea, as much as anything, that gave the place its tone and distinction. Gulls wheeled and cried over the housetops. Sailors mingled with the evening crowds along Fulton Street. The salt air, reputedly, was “pure and bracing…wafted from a thousand miles seaward.”

  From half a dozen different high points, from Prospect Park, for example, or from Greenwood Cemetery, the world opened up in all directions and to the south was the Atlantic breaking on the shores of Coney Island. Brooklyn, it was claimed, offered “the most majestic views of land and ocean, with panoramic changes more varied and beautiful than any to be found within the boundaries of any city on this continent,” and apparently that was no exaggeration.

  Certainly the view from the Heights was as fine as anything on the eastern seaboard—a sparkling blue and green sweep of 180 degrees, taking in river, bay, Manhattan, the Jersey hills, Staten Island. There were ships everywhere one looked, making for port, heading out to sea. On any summer day in 1869, when the age of sail and the age of steam still overlapped, river and harbor were a ceaseless pageant. New York was the principal reason for most all of it, of course, but Brooklyn had the view.

  Old engravings of New York harbor generally show the boats all out of scale, too big, that is, but the shape and nature of the various species represented are a great deal clearer that way and the over-all effect considerably more enjoyable. To judge from such views, there must have been few places on earth where a city dweller could drink in quite so much space and sky or see so much going on that was so everlastingly interesting to watch. The water is filled with schooners, packets, pleasure yachts, gleaming white excursion steamers the size of hotels, and giant iron-hulled, ocean-going sailer-steamers like the new City of Brooklyn, the latest and largest ship on the Inman Line. (At a banquet served on board the City of Brooklyn that spring, at the end of her maiden voyage, the spirit of good fellowship was such, reportedly, that Beecher broke bread with the Democrats.) Freight-car lighters, hay barges, sand barges, countless steam tugs move back and forth, up and down the river, and everywhere, cutting between them, sidling off crab fashion against the tide, are the Brooklyn ferries.

  It was a prospect to cleanse the spirit, no doubt, to put things back in proper balance at the end of a long business day. From such a vantage point, New York was clearly not all there was to life on earth. Even the ferries looked like nothing more than clever toys, perfect in every detail, down to the feathers of coal smoke trailing from each funnel. After dark, with their colored lights, they gave the river “a gala appearance.”

  A perfectly healthful place in all seasons and in all respects, Hezekiah Pierrepont had said of these gentle bluffs on the river, the heaped-up leavings of the last of the glaciers. The salt air filled the lungs, and to the rear stretched Long Island, a hundred miles of open country. An enterprising brewer with large cedar-dotted holdings on the Heights, Pierrepont, fifty years before, had advertised lots “for families who may desire to associate in forming a select neighborhood and circle of society, for a summer’s residence, or a whole year…” Gentlemen whose business or profession required “their daily attendance in the city” could not do better, he said. His lots were 25 by 100 feet, many fronting on the river, others on “spacious streets 60 feet wide.” By 1869 shade trees made green canopies over red brick sidewalks, upon which fronted some of the stateliest houses in America. As neighborhoods went, there was nothing in New York to compare to it. The Heights had become everything the brewer promised, all that the name implied.

  Few in Manhattan could match Willow, Pierrepont, or Clinton Streets, or Columbia Heights, the street running parallel to the river. Built of brick or brownstone, with rows of tall windows, the houses ran “plump out” to the sidewalk, almost without exception. Most of them were quite grand in dimension, beautifully detailed, with marble sills and cast-iron stair rails. Some, such as the Low place on Columbia Heights, were mansions by any man’s standards. But there was little of the flamboyant display soon to characterize Fifth Avenue. No one house seemed designed for the express purpose of upstaging its neighbor. As the Eagle observed, “Almost everybody appears to have built his house like somebody else.”

  The Heights was the unchallenged social, cultural, and moral center of Brooklyn life, with the social and moral part of things taken the most seriously. It was also, one would gather, about as pleasant and lovely a place to live as there was to be found in urban America, then or since. It was not Brooklyn, but it was very often taken to be.

  There on the Heights lived the oldest, wealthiest Brooklyn families—the Pierreponts, the Brevoorts, the Lows; A. S. Barnes, the book and hymnal publisher, with his family of ten children; Simeon Baldwin Chittenden, Moses Beach, Gordon Ford. They were second-generation New Englanders, in the main. They were the people who gave habitually to charity drives and figured on the boards of various Brooklyn institutions. Their names on a directors’ list or an incorporating charter meant eminent respectability. They employed the best cooks, sent their sons to Yale or Columbia. On spring evenings along the shore drive to Fort Hamilton, they could be seen riding with “elegant equipages, well-dressed grooms, and spanking teams.” As it happens, most of them were not around that summer of 1869. They had packed off weeks earlier, as was their custom, moving out en masse nearly—children, servants, steamer trunks, picnic hampers—to Oak Bluffs, Newport, Saratoga, or the White Mountains. All through July and August the Eagle carried regular columns to report their doings.

  The heads of such families generally worked in New York, in banking, dry goods, “the China trade.” Some owned the ships that tied up beneath their windows. A few were also men of learning. J. Carson Brevoort, to give just one example, had been educated in Europe and served for a time as private secretary to Washington
Irving. He was a recognized authority on American history and entomology. “His knowledge of fish,” it is reported on good authority, “was hardly exceeded by any naturalist and his collection of books and specimens was magnificent and valuable.”

  Among such men and in such a setting, New Yorkers of comparable station might well wish to make their home once the bridge was built and the inconvenience of the ferries was no longer an issue.

  At Clinton and Pierrepont stood the Brooklyn Club, where, as one visitor noted happily, the members not only referred to one another’s wives on a first-name basis, but their servants as well. Close by were the Mercantile Library, the Long Island Historical Society, and the Music Academy, where the Heights gathered for “uplifting” lectures, amateur theatrical productions and musicals, Johann Strauss on one occasion, and yearly charity balls. In the grand ballroom “one could not move a foot without appearing in mirrors.”

  And there, too, on the Heights, stood what was held to be not only the moral and spiritual center of Brooklyn and New York, but of all America. Brooklyn was “The City of Churches,” Talmage and Storrs were among its pastors. But Plymouth Church, a big brick barn of a building on Orange Street, was its foremost institution, bar none, the thing Brooklyn was famous for from one end of the land to the other. For it was there, on an open platform, before a congregation of two thousand or more, that Beecher preached, weekly—except summers—taking the Rocky Mountains as his sounding board, as one man said.

  From the photographs there are of Henry Ward Beecher and the volumes of printed sermons, it is a little hard to understand just what all the excitement was about. One eye droops quite noticeably, giving him an unbalanced, slightly unpleasant look. He wore his hair long and loose, as was the custom with many platform spellbinders of the time, and by 1869, at age fifty-six, he was beginning to look a little gray and too well fed. Still, by all accounts, he had a physical vitality, an exuberance that appealed enormously to both men and women. In an age that adored both oratory and showmanship, he was the supreme orator and apparently one of the great performers of all time.

  A brilliant pantomimist and mimic, he could turn in an instant from radiant joy to real tears to thundering, righteous anger—whichever was called for. He used no notes and began his sermons very softly, as though holding a private conversation with the front pews. But then all at once the “full, round, sonorous” voice would fill the church. Mark Twain, who watched in awe from the gallery one Sunday, wrote, “He went marching up and down the stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point.”

  America had never produced anything quite like this man. Except possibly for Grant, no one alive was so highly regarded. His sermons were read avidly in the newspapers, and gotten up in book form they outsold the most popular fiction. Sunday-morning ferries to Brooklyn were known as “Beecher boats.” The easiest way to find Plymouth Church from the ferry landing was to follow the crowd.

  One could look through the hundreds, the thousands, of speeches and sermons delivered by Beecher during the years the bridge was being planned and built and doubtless find a Beecher quote on the subject. There was little in life he did not have something to say about, and particularly if it was a matter of popular interest. Perhaps, like the merchants on Fulton Street, he envisioned whole new elements of New York society suddenly discovering Brooklyn once the great span arched the river. On Sundays it might even become “Beecher’s Bridge.” Of greater interest, however, is what Brooklyn thought of him, what he meant to Brooklyn.

  His name was in the papers almost daily, which suggests people never tired of reading about him—what he had to say on free trade or growing onions or the vagaries of the weather. He was regarded as a master of conversation, when in truth he seems to have been more a master of the monologue. His entrance into any Brooklyn auditorium or public gathering was the immediate signal for an ovation, and the plot he had picked out at Greenwood for himself and his stiff, severe-looking wife was a tourist attraction.

  The rich and the famous paid him all kinds of homage—Lincoln once said he was the greatest man in America—and Plymouth Church paid him twenty thousand dollars a year, or the same as the President of the United States received. And nobody thought that out of line. It is perhaps impossible to imagine the hold he had on his time.

  “Our institutions live in him,” said the Eagle, “our thoughts as a nation breathe in him, our muscular Christianity finds in him the most vigorous champion. He is the Hercules of American Protestantism…”

  The presence of such an individual would give a place a certain aura, needless to say, and was certainly a factor in determining the kind of people who had been choosing the Heights as a place to live over the twenty-odd years since Beecher first arrived there—not all of whom, it ought to be said, were excessively wealthy or prominent socially. Perhaps the most fitting description of people on the Heights at the time the bridge was about to be built is one written of the Plymouth Church congregation by a visiting reporter from Massachusetts. “A more intelligent body of people one would rarely find,” he said. “A phrenologist would praise their intellectual developments, while there is a look of cheerful hearty satisfaction on most of their faces, as if they relished life and were seldom troubled with the blues…It is a well-to-do body also; not aristocratic or fashionable, though a score or more came in their carriages, but prudent and prosperous, as if they lived in good houses and both earned and enjoyed worldly comforts.”

  There was more to be said for Brooklyn. Gas rates were reasonable. Taxes were still lower than in New York. The schools were far superior. Local government was reputed to be honest, which it was not, but in contrast to the way things were done on the other side of the river, it looked pretty good. Streets were reasonably well lighted after dark and for a city of its size there was little crime. The drinking water was delicious.

  The Eagle, Brooklyn’s leading daily, was certainly another amenity, and Thomas Kinsella, its editor, who was soon to become a Congressman as well, was regarded as a perfect example of how far a deserving immigrant boy could rise in America.

  Jobs happened also to be plentiful in Brooklyn just then. Charles Dickens, after a recent visit, dismissed Brooklyn as “a sort of sleeping place” for New York. But from the statistics available, it appears New York employed considerably less than half of Brooklyn’s wage earners, perhaps even as few as one in three.

  In any event, theirs was the fit place to live, most Brooklyn people felt. It was the more truly American city. New York, for all its enticements, was regarded as a monstrous, cold place, overcrowded, overpriced, bewildering—unwholesome. In Brooklyn a clerk could own a home. Of the five hundred miles of streets Brooklyn land speculators liked to exclaim over (“five miles for every one in New York”) only half had anything built on them as yet.

  Brooklyn had its shortcomings, of course. Even the best restaurants and shops were second-rate compared to those in New York. The air in the neighborhood of Peter Cooper’s glue factory was not exactly that of the open sea and the average Brooklyn saloon, according to one source, smelled like a kennel. Nor was Brooklyn innocent of the filth and squalor so commonly attributed to “the modern Babel” across the way. The tenements on the “flats,” south of the Navy Yard, where a large part of Brooklyn’s Irish lived, were as foul as any in New York.

  But Delmonico’s, Barnum’s museum, evenings at the theater, Wall Street, adventure, all the “delights” of New York were readily available over the river. That, after all, was one of the most appealing things about Brooklyn—it had New York at such easy reach, it offered the best of both worlds.

  As for those unpleasant neighborhoods by the Navy Yard, well, most people never ventured down such streets or had any real idea of the life that went on there; and, naturally, what most people believed to be the truth was more important at the
time than any latter-day objective appraisal of how things were. People then were still inclined to form opinions more from experience than information and it was the experience of most Brooklyn people that between their city and the other one, there was no comparison.

  Moreover, the bridge was going to make things better still. Like most of their countrymen, Brooklyn people, the newcomers especially, were essentially expectant at heart, optimistic, looking forward, believing fervently in the future. How much was already known of the politics the bridge involved, one wonders, or of the various bargains that had been struck? How much was even suspected? How many people had speculated seriously on what the real cost of the bridge might be?

  There is a story about where and when the bridge scheme was hatched in Brooklyn and a plaque that commemorates the event, in Owl’s Head Park, near the place where Henry Cruse Murphy’s house once stood.

  The winter of 1866-67 was as severe as any on record. Ice conditions on the river were so bad on several occasions that a traveler by train from Albany could reach New York in less time than a commuter from Brooklyn could. Roebling’s bridge had opened in Cincinnati with national acclaim and every Brooklyn paper was demanding a bridge to New York.

  Then, on the night of December 21, 1866, young William Kingsley, convinced the time was ripe to get a bridge bill before the Albany legislature, decided to ride down to Bay Ridge to call on Henry Murphy. The night was bitterly cold, no night to be out, according to the story, and Bay Ridge was a good four-mile drive. Kingsley was accompanied by Judge Alexander McCue, a close friend of Murphy’s, who went along, he said later, merely to give Kingsley what support he could, for Murphy then was known to be “far from persuaded of the practicability of the enterprise.”

  Kingsley had been conferring since summer with Julius Adams on the engineering involved, and in the library of Murphy’s palatial home, beside a log fire, the conversation went on until past midnight. Murphy is said to have been highly skeptical at first, even hostile to the whole idea of a bridge. Kingsley is supposed to have responded with mounting enthusiasm for his subject, meeting Murphy’s every argument with sharp, convincing rejoinders. Describing the scene later, McCue said of Kingsley, “His unexhausting and unresting mind, matchless in its clarity and invincible in its force, was my wonder and admiration.” After a time Murphy was listening as though under a spell.