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Gateway to a Century

The Brooklyn Bridge was a magnificent undertaking, the last great work of an age

By Drew Fetherston | Staff Writer

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On the sunny afternoon of May 24, 1883, an ironmaker and political reformer named Abram Hewitt stepped to a podium to formally present the great new bridge over the East River to the mayors of New York City and Brooklyn.

The multitude that had assembled to celebrate the bridge's opening stretched far

beyond the reach of Hewitt's voice. It filled adjacent neighborhoods to the rooftops, filled the decks of steamboats that almost carpeted the river, filled the deck of the bridge itself.

Hewitt, who had been been a government watchdog on the project, and who became New York's mayor in 1887, compared the structure to the pyramids. ``The cities of New York and Brooklyn have constructed, and today rejoice in the possession of, the crowning glory of an age memorable for great industrial achievements.''

In a sense, Hewitt missed the Brooklyn Bridge's significance: The splendid, soaring structure was less the crowning glory of his age than the cornerstone of the next, of the half-century in which America would become the most powerful nation on the planet and the envy of the world.

Still, Hewitt had every right to be impressed. He was describing what was then the longest suspension bridge in the world, a bridge whose stone towers were taller than every building in New York City except for the slender steeple of Trinity Church. Its four great cables each contained enough wire to stretch from New York to London. The project had taken more than 15 years to complete, had cost several lives and $15 million, had killed its designer and crippled his son.

And the bridge was, as Hewitt said, the last great work of an age. Willard Glazer, in his 1886 book, ``Peculiarities of American Cities,'' noted, ``With the completion of this bridge the continent is entirely spanned, and one may visit, dry shod and without the use of ferry-boats, every city from the Atlantic to the Golden Gate.''

Except for the swift and turbulent East River, all of the waters that flowed between the oceans had been spanned before John Roebling and his son, Washington Roebling, began work on the bridge. For Long Island, the bridge was a stimulant for growth - allowing easy access to the great marketplace of New York City and the nation beyond.

But the Brooklyn Bridge was more than a mere link in a transportation system. It was also a catalyst for change. When it opened, a correspondent from Harper's Magazine wrote: ``The wise man will not cross the bridge in five minutes, nor in twenty. He will linger to get the good of the splendid sweep of the view about him.''

Among the sights, he wrote, were ``the marshes, rivers and cities of New Jersey stretching to Orange Mountain and the farther heights; the Palisades walling the mighty Hudson . . . And when he takes his walks about New York he can scarcely lose sight of what is now the great landmark which characterizes and dominates the city . . . ''

Within a few years, the long vista stretching miles into New Jersey would be blocked by the great metropolis that replaced the three- and four-story City of New York, and the bridge would stand in the shadow of immense buildings. The modern world that it had helped to create would come to view the Brooklyn Bridge as an esthetic rather than an engineering triumph.

The idea of an East River bridge had been around long before there was technology to build one; legislation authorizing such a link was introduced in Albany in 1802.

Nine years later, an eccentric visionary named Thomas Pope offered to span the East River between Brooklyn and New York with what he called his Flying Pendant Lever Bridge, a timber rainbow that would soar 223 feet above the swift-running water.

Pope - whose business card identified him as an ``architect and landscape gardener'' - said the bridge could be built of wood alone to keep costs low.

Doubters he dismissed as being ``under the influence of one of two things: namely, a total ignorance of the invention, or a contemptible opposition to its success.'' His confidence was not matched by any public enthusiasm. He left town to try his sales pitch - again unsuccessfully - in Philadelphia.

It was not that New Yorkers and their Long Island neighbors didn't want an East River bridge. Everyone was acutely aware of the dangers and incoveniences of crossing the river by ferry.

Commerce between the city and the Island had long before made the ferry service a lucrative, government-regulated business. The problem was that population had quickly outstripped technology: When Pope arrived, people were crossing just as they had in 1679, when the Dutch missionary Jasper Dankaerts made the trip ``in a row-boat, as it happened, which, in good weather and tide, carries a sail.''

Nathaniel S. Prime, in his 1845 ``History of Long Island,'' recalled a time, early in his century, when the ferries offered ``oar-barges for foot-passengers and sprit-sail boats for horses and carriages.'' Prime recalled times when he ``waited from morning to night on the Brooklyn side, in a northeast storm, before any boat ventured to cross to the city.'' Ice and storms claimed boats, goods and lives with depressing regularity.

But no one quite believed that Pope could deliver the graceful cantilever bridge - with revenue-producing warehouses, stores and houses built into its stone abutments - for the $144,000 he said it would take. They instead put their faith in new horse-powered paddle-wheel boats that made their appearance in 1814, and the steam-powered marvels that followed almost immediately.

Steamboats made matters worse, in a manner now familiar to road planners: They encouraged the growth of Brooklyn, which quickly became the first suburb of New York as well as a prospering city in its own right.