The Great Bridge Read online

  In April 1867 a charter authorizing a private company to build and operate an East River bridge had been voted through at Albany. The charter was a most interesting and important document, for several different reasons, as time would tell. But in the things it said and left unsaid concerning the actual structure to be built, it was notable at a glance. Not a word was mentioned, for example, about the sort of bridge it was to be or to suggest that its construction might involve any significant or foreseeable problems. The cities were not required to approve the plans or the location. The charter said only that it be a toll bridge. It was important that it have a “substantial railing” and that it be “kept fully lighted through all hours of the night.” It was also to be completed by January 1, 1870.

  A month after the charter became law, Roebling had been named engineer of the work. By whom or by what criteria remained a puzzle for anyone trying to follow the story in the papers. In September, that same year, 1867, at a private meeting held in Brooklyn, he presented his master plan in a long formal report. But such was “the anxiety manifested on the part of the press of the two cities to present his report to the public, that it was taken and published, as an entirety…” The bridge had no official name at this point, and in the time since, nobody seemed able to settle on one.

  At an earlier stage it had been referred to occasionally as the Empire Bridge, but the organization incorporated to build it was called the New York Bridge Company, because the Brooklyn people behind the idea saw it as just that—a bridge to New York. Roebling, on the other hand, had referred to it as the East River Bridge in his proposal and the newspapers and magazines had picked up the name. But it was also commonly called the Roebling Bridge or the Brooklyn Bridge or simply the Great Bridge, which looked the most impressive in print and to many seemed the most fitting name of all, once they grasped what exactly Roebling was planning to do.

  But it was the possible future impact of such a structure on their own lives that interested people most, naturally enough, and that the press in both cities devoted the most attention to. The Times, for example, described the bridge as a sort of grand long-needed pressure valve that would do much to alleviate New York’s two most serious problems, crime and overcrowding.

  In Brooklyn, where interest was the keenest, it was said the bridge would make Brooklyn important, that it would make Brooklyn prosper. Property values would soar. Roebling the alchemist would turn vacant lots and corn patches into pure gold. Everybody would benefit. Brooklyn was already expanding like a boomtown, and the bridge was going to double the pace, the way steam ferries had. Merchants could expect untold numbers of new customers as disaffected New Yorkers flocked across the river to make Brooklyn their home. Manufacturers would have closer ties with New York markets. Long Island farmers and Brooklyn brewers could get their wares over the river more readily. The mail would move faster. Roebling had even told his eager clients how, in the event of an enemy invasion of Long Island, troops could be rushed over the bridge from New York in unprecedented numbers. In such an emergency, the old Prussian had calculated, nearly half a million men, together with artillery and baggage trains, could go over the bridge in twenty-four hours.

  Most appealing of all for the Brooklyn people who went to New York to earn a living every day was the prospect of a safe, reliable alternative to the East River ferries. Winds, storms, tides, blizzards, ice jams, fog, none of these, they were told, would have the slightest effect on Mr. Roebling’s bridge. There would be no more shoving crowds at the ferryhouse loading gates. There would be no more endless delays. One Christmas night a gale had caused the river to be so low the ferries ran aground and thousands of people spent the night in the Fulton Ferry house. Many winters when the river froze solid, there had been no service at all for days on end.

  Some of the Brooklyn business people and Kings County politicians were even claiming that the bridge would make Brooklyn the biggest city in America, a most heady prospect indeed and not an unreasonable one either. Congressman Demas Barnes contended Brooklyn would be the biggest city in the world, once New York was “full.” New York, that “human hive” John Roebling called it, was running out of space, its boundaries being forever fixed by nature. Roebling and others envisioned a day when all Manhattan Island would be built over, leaving “no decent place” to make a home, neither he nor anyone else thus far having imagined a city growing vertically. “Brooklyn happens to be one of those things that can expand,” wrote the editors of the new Brooklyn Monthly. “The more you put into it, the more it will hold.”

  And such highly regarded Brooklyn residents as Walt Whitman and James S. T. Stranahan, the man behind Brooklyn’s new Prospect Park, looked to the day when the bridge would make Brooklyn and New York “emphatically one,” which was also generally taken to be a very good thing, since the new Union Pacific Railroad was going to make New York “the commercial emporium of the world.” This was no idle speculation, “but the natural and legitimate result of natural causes,” according to John Roebling. His bridge was part of a larger mission. “As the great flow of civilization has ever been from East towards the West, with the same certainty will the greatest commercial emporium be located on this continent, which links East to the West, and whose mission it is in the history of mankind to blend the most ancient civilization with the most modern.” The famous engineer, it had been noticed in Brooklyn, tended to cosmic concepts, but so much the better. If there were now forty million people crossing the East River every year, as was the claim, then, he said, in ten years’ time there would be a hundred million.

  “Lines of steamers, such as the world never saw before, are now plowing the Atlantic in regular straight line furrows,” he had written in his proposal. “The same means of communication will unite the western coast of this continent to the eastern coast of Asia. New York will remain the center where these lines meet.”

  This, in other words, was to be something much more than a large bridge over an important river. It was to be one of history’s great connecting works, symbolic of the new age, like the Atlantic cable, the Suez Canal, and the transcontinental railroad. “Lo, Soul, seest thou not God’s purpose from the first?” wrote Walt Whitman at about this time. “The earth be spann’d, connected by network…The lands welded together.” “The shapes arise!” wrote the Brooklyn poet.

  Singing my days,

  Singing the great achievements of the present

  Singing the strong, light works of engineers…

  But it was Roebling himself, never one to be overly modest, who had set forth the most emphatic claim for the bridge itself and the one that would be quoted most often in time to come:

  The completed work, when constructed in accordance with my designs, will not only be the greatest bridge in existence, but it will be the greatest engineering work of the continent, and of the age. Its most conspicuous features, the great towers, will serve as landmarks to the adjoining cities, and they will be entitled to be ranked as national monuments. As a great work of art, and as a successful specimen of advanced bridge engineering, this structure will forever testify to the energy, enterprise and wealth of that community which shall secure its erection.

  Roebling had written that in 1867, at the very start of his formal proposal, but in all the time since, for some mysterious reason, not a spade of dirt had been turned and numbers of people, some claiming to be experts, had begun saying they were not so sure about Roebling’s “advanced engineering,” or whether it was worth the six to seven million dollars he had said it would cost, an estimate that did not include the price of the land required. Even if his figures were realistic, the bridge would also be about the most expensive ever built.

  The editors of Scientific American said a tunnel would serve the purpose as well and cost less. A Navy engineer presented an alternative plan. He wanted to block off “the vexatious East River” with a dam several hundred feet wide on which he would build highways, stores, docks, and warehouses. By early 1869, when it looked
as though the bridge might actually be started, the critics were sounding forth as never before. Warehouse owners along the river and others in the shipping business were calling it an obstruction to navigation and a public nuisance. The New York Polytechnic Society put on a series of lectures at Cooper Union devoted exclusively to the supposed engineering fallacies of the Roebling plan. Engineers expressed “grave apprehension.” The bridge, it was stated on the best professional authority, was a monumental extravagance, “a wild experiment,” nothing but an exercise in vanity. Even in Brooklyn the Union said another bridge and a tunnel besides would probably be built by the time everyone finished wrangling over details and questioned why, for so momentous a public work, only one engineer had been called on and no other plans ever considered.

  So it had been to still such talk that Roebling had assembled his seven consultants and with total patience and candor went over everything with them point by point.

  To begin with it was to be the largest suspension bridge in the world. It was to be half again the size of his bridge over the Ohio at Cincinnati, for example, and nearly twice the length of Telford’s famous bridge over the Menai Strait, in Wales, the first suspension bridge of any real importance. It was to cross the East River with one uninterrupted central span, held aloft by huge cables slung from the tops of two colossal stone towers and secured on either shore to massive masonry piles called anchorages. These last structures alone, he said, would be a good seven stories tall, or taller than most buildings in New York at the time. They would each take up the better part of a city block and would be heavy enough to offset the immense pull of the cables, but hollow inside, to provide, Roebling suggested, room for cavernous treasury vaults, which he claimed would be the safest in America and ample enough to house three-quarters of all the investments and securities in the country.

  The towers, the “most conspicuous features,” would be identical and 268 feet high. They would stand on either side of the river, in the water but close to shore, their foundations out of sight beneath the riverbed. Their most distinguishing features would be twin Gothic arches—two in each tower—through which the roadways were to pass. These arches would rise more than a hundred feet, like majestic cathedral windows, or the portals of triumphal gateways. “In a work of such magnitude, and located as it is between two great cities, good architectural proportions should be observed,” wrote the engineer. “…The impression of the whole will be that of massiveness and strength.”

  His towers would dwarf everything else in view. They would reign over the landscape like St. Peters in Rome or the Capitol dome in Washington, as one newspaper said. In fact, the towers would be higher than the Capitol dome if the dome’s crowning statue of Freedom was not taken into account. So this in the year 1869—when the Washington Monument was still an ugly stone stump—meant they would be about the largest, most massive things ever built on the entire North American continent. On the New York skyline only the slim spire of Trinity Church at the head of Wall Street reached higher.

  The towers were to serve two very fundamental purposes. They would bear the weight of four enormous cables and they would hold both the cables and the roadway of the bridge high enough so they would not interfere with traffic on the river. Were the two cities at higher elevations, were they set on cliffs, or palisades, such as those along the New Jersey side of the Hudson, for example, such lofty stonework would not be necessary. As it was, however, only very tall towers could make up for what nature had failed to provide, if there was to be the desired clearance for sailing ships. And as the mass of the anchorages had to be sufficient to offset the pull of the cables, where they were secured on land, so the mass of the towers, whatever their height, had to be sufficient to withstand the colossal downward pressure of the cables as they passed over the tops of the towers.

  Below the water the towers were to be of limestone and each was to be set on a tremendous wooden foundation, but from the water-line up they were to be of granite. In plan each tower was essentially three shafts of solid masonry, connected below the roadway, or bridge floor, by hollow masonry walls, but left unconnected above the bridge floor until they joined high overhead to form the great Gothic arches, which, in turn, were to be topped by a heavy cornice and three huge capstones. The total weight of each tower, Roebling estimated, would be 67,850 tons, but with the weight of the roadway and its iron superstructure added on they would each weigh 72,603 tons.

  The suspended roadway’s great “river span” was to be held between the towers by the four immense cables, two outer ones and two near the middle of the bridge floor. These cables would be as much as fifteen inches in diameter and each would hang over the river in what is known as a catenary curve, that perfect natural form taken by any rope or cable suspended from two points, which in this case were the summits of the two stone towers. At the bottom of the curve each cable would join with the river span, at the center of the span. But all along the cables, vertical “suspenders,” wire ropes about as thick as a pick handle, would be strung like harp strings down to the bridge floor. And across those would run a pattern of diagonal, or inclined, stays, hundreds of heavy wire ropes that would radiate down from the towers and secure at various points along the bridge floor, both in the direction of the land and toward the center of the river span.

  The wire rope for the suspenders and stays was to be of the kind manufactured by Roebling at his Trenton works. It was to be made in the same way as ordinary hemp rope, that is, with hundreds of fine wires twisted to form a rope. The cables, however, would be made of wire about as thick as a lead pencil, with thousands of wires to a cable, all “laid up” straight, parallel to one another, and then wrapped with an outer skin of soft wire, the way the base strings of a piano are wrapped.

  But most important of all, Roebling was talking about making the cables of steel, “the metal of the future,” instead of using iron wire, as had always been done before. There was not a bridge in the country then, not a building in New York or in any city as yet, built of steel, but Roebling was seriously considering its use and the idea was regarded by many engineers as among the most revolutionary and therefore questionable features of his entire plan.

  The way he had designed it, the enormous structure was to be a grand harmony of opposite forces—the steel of the cables in tension, the granite of the towers in compression. “A force at rest is at rest because it is balanced by some other force or by its own reaction,” he had once written in the pages of Scientific American. He considered mathematics a spiritual perception, as well as the highest science, and since all engineering questions were governed by “simple mathematical considerations,” the suspension bridge was “a spiritual or ideal conception.”

  His new bridge was to be “a great avenue” between the cities, he said. Its over-all width was to be eighty feet, making it as spacious as Broadway itself, as he liked to tell people, and the river span would measure sixteen hundred feet, from tower to tower, making it the longest single span in the world. But of even greater import than length was the unprecedented load the bridge was designed to bear—18,700 tons.

  The long river span was not to be perfectly horizontal, but would bow gracefully, gently upward. It would pass through the tower arches at an elevation of 119 feet, but at the center it would be 130 feet over the water. This, as Roebling pointed out, was thirty feet higher than the elevation fixed by the British Admiralty for Robert Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait, built nearly twenty years earlier. Before long, sailing ships would be things of the past, he declared. His bridge therefore would be no obstruction to navigation, only possibly “an impediment to sailing.” As it was, only the very largest sailing ships afloat would have to trim their topmasts to pass beneath the bridge.

  But because of the great elevation of the river span and the relatively low-lying shores, the rest of the bridge, sloping down to ground level, would have to extend quite far inland on both sides to provide an easy grade. The bridge would
have to descend back to earth rather gradually, as it were, and thus the better part of it would be over land, not water. Those inland sections of the bridge between the towers and the two anchorages were known as the land spans, and were also supported by the cables, by suspenders and diagonal stays. The ends of the bridge, from the anchorages down to ground level, were known as the approaches. In all, from one end to the other, the Great Bridge was to measure 5,862 feet, or more than a mile.

  The red line Roebling had drawn on the map ran southeast from City Hall Park, in New York, crossing the river not quite at right angles, at that point where the river was returning to its essentially north-south course. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard—over to the right of the red line—the river turned sharply to the left, heading nearly due west, but then it quickly turned down the map again to merge with the harbor. And it was right there, where the river turned the second time, right about where the Fulton Ferry crossed, that Roebling had put his “Park Line” connecting New York, on the upper left of the map, with Brooklyn, on the lower right.

  The precise terminating point on the New York side was at Chatham Street, opposite the park. This was the place for the bridge to come in, he said. For the next fifty years the park would remain “the great focus of travel, from which speedy communications will ramify in all directions.” From there his red line crossed over North William Street, William, Rose, Vandewater, and half a dozen more streets, to the end of Pier 29, then over the river, straight through one of the Fulton Ferry slips, and into Brooklyn. Running parallel with Fulton Street, Brooklyn’s main thoroughfare, the line cut across a patchwork of narrow cross streets—Water, Dock, Front, James—to Prospect, where it bent slightly toward Fulton, terminating finally in the block bounded by Prospect, Washington, Sands, and Fulton, or right about where St. Ann’s Church stood.