Roebling's First Dream: The Queensboro

John Roebling was enthusiastic.

"No other part of the East River offers a locality so favorable to bridging," the great engineer wrote to the New York businessmen who proposed building a span to link Manhattan and Long Island.

But the East River bridge that so interested Roebling was not the Brooklyn Bridge that would be the cornerstone of his enduring fame. This span -- proposed in 1856, more than a decade before the Brooklyn Bridge project took form in 1867 -- was what would become the Queensboro Bridge.

Roebling had been thinking about an East River bridge since 1852. He quickly concluded that Blackwells Island -- now Roosevelt Island -- would make a perfect stepping stone for crossing the swift stream. One could build two bridges of manageable size -- from Manhattan to Blackwells Island, and from the island to Long Island City -- rather than one very long span.

It was far from an original idea. In October, 1836, a Jamaica weekly newspaper, the Long Island Democrat, reported that "a project has been lately started, to build a suspension bridge over Long Island Sound near Hallet's Cove or Ravenswood." The cove is near the north end of Blackwells Island; Ravenswood is near the center.

Such a link, the editor wrote, "would soon make Hallet's Cove rival Brooklyn in population."

In the following two years, the bridge proposal acquired form in articles published in The Family Magazine: It would have three 700-foot suspension spans -- the center one would cross Blackwells Island -- and a 45-foot-wide roadway. It was to be 120 feet above the water, and the Manhattan end would be somewhere between 65th and 75th Streets. It would cost between $500,000 and $600,000.

Nothing happened, though, until the financiers approached Roebling and invited him to design a bridge over Blackwells Island.

Roebling obliged with drawings of a very slender bridge composed of two 800-foot suspension spans linked by a 500-foot cantilever section over the island. The roadway would be a mere 22 feet wide (the inner roadway on the Queensboro Bridge is about 51 feet wide), and would be flanked by two 6-foot-wide walkways outside the suspension cables. The cost, Roebling said with typical precision, would be $1,216,740.

But the project stalled, and Roebling in 1857 wrote to Abram Hewitt, an industrialist who would become New York's mayor in 1887, suggesting that a bridge be built to Brooklyn. Hewitt caused the letter to be published in New York.

Hewitt, who later became a government watchdog and trustee of the Brooklyn Bridge project, credited the Civil War with making that bridge possible, since it "accustomed the nation to expenditures on a scale of which it had no previous conception."

Political corruption followed, Hewitt said: "In the city of New York . . . the government fell into the hands of a band of thieves, who engaged in a series of great and beneficial public works, not for the good they might do, but for the opportunity which they would afford to rob the public treasury."

One of the great public works born of corrupt impulses, according to Hewitt, was the Brooklyn Bridge, which the Tweed Ring infiltrated in a quest for patronage jobs and outright graft. Powerful politicians thus had a vested interest in that project.

They had no such interest in the Blackwells Island bridge, and the results were predictable: Although the Queens bridge company received its state charter on the same day as the Brooklyn group -- April 16, 1867 -- the span across Blackwells Island remained a paper dream while the Brooklyn Bridge became granite-and-steel reality.

The Blackwells Island bridge was of particular interest to a series of top executives of the Long Island Rail Road, which hoped to run trains from its Sunnyside yard across the bridge, to link up with the New York Central tracks.

But the project was beset by delays. In 1877, the bridge's most powerful backer, piano maker William Steinway, stepped down as chairman of the New York and Long Island Bridge Co., to be replaced by William Rainey, a steamship operator who agreed to invest $30,000. The bridge would bring the ruin of his hopes and his health during the next two dozen years.

It wasn't until March 25, 1881, when the Brooklyn Bridge was nearing completion, that the New York and Long Island Bridge Co. awarded a $6.4-million contract to a Philadelphia company to start work.

"It is only when the narrow East River is crossed and free, open, high, healthy Long Island is reached that the poor man's land is found, a place of refuge from tenement life," Rainey wrote a few week later. "Give these cheap-home seekers a chance, and they will gravitate to it as by a natural law."

Work began on the first pier in the Queens side of the river, but the venture ran out of money even before the Brooklyn Bridge opened in May, 1883.

Construction resumed in 1895, but litigation and the death of Austin Corbin, president of the Long Island Rail Road and a prominent backer, halted it almost immediately. The coup de grace came in 1901, when the city decided to build the bridge itself.

Rainey was a guest at the opening ceremonies for the bridge in 1909. The ailing 84-year-old swallowed whatever bitterness he felt and pronounced it "a grand bridge, much grander than the one I had in mind. It will be of great service to thousands in the years to come." He was dead within a year. In 1912, the city acquired land that would have been the Queens end of his bridge, and named it Rainey Park.

As Rainey had foreseen, the bridge helped turn Queens into a boom town, with real estate development spreading like ripples in a pond from the plaza at its end. When the bridge opened, Queens' population was 275,000; it grew to 469,000 by 1920 and topped a million by 1930.

A herald of this expansion was to be found in the person of Elizabeth Augenti, 19, who was chosen "Queen of the Queensboro Bridge" for the opening ceremonies. Augenti worked for Long Island Guarantee Trust, a bank that was assembling tracts of land for development. Her job was to pose as a buyer of modest means, to keep the bank's price low.