The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

by David McCullough

Can we ever forget the photograph by Steve Ludlum on the front page of The New York Times the morning of September 12, 2001? There, in full color, filling the whole top third of the picture, was the World Trade Center engulfed in smoke and flame. And there also, lower down, in sharp focus in the foreground, was the Brooklyn Bridge, a solid presence no less than ever.

it can be terribly dangerous, even perilous, to assume that because people hold positions of responsibility they are therefore acting responsibly.

The chief problem always was the East River, which is no river at all technically speaking, but a tidal strait and one of the most turbulent and in that day, especially, one of the busiest stretches of navigable salt water anywhere on earth.

“If one plan won’t do, then another must.”

He was the first one on deck in the morning and generally the last to leave at night, and once, when nearly every passenger was miserably seasick and lay groaning in his berth, Roebling, his head spinning, his stomach churning, was resolutely walking the deck. The malady, he rationalized, “involves no danger at all,” noting that “a cheerful carefree disposition and a manly, vigorous spirit will have great influence on the sickness.”

That such outsize, unprecedented efforts frequently involved watered stock, political jobbery, kickbacks for contractors, and not a little human suffering was either not altogether apparent as yet or of minor concern. So much good was going to come out of so comparatively little evil, it was generally felt, that the evil seemed a reasonable price to pay, and probably inevitable in any event.

He was regarded as a master of conversation, when in truth he seems to have been more a master of the monologue.

Precisely how much he and his cohorts managed to steal from the people of New York will never be known for certain, but responsible estimates range from $75 million to $200 million. Tweed himself, personally, probably made off with $30 million before he was deposed.

The only one who could handle such an order, it was decided, was a shipbuilder, and on October 25, 1869, the contract was awarded to the firm of Webb & Bell, whose yards were up the river at Greenpoint. And if a date were to be picked to mark the beginning of the building of the bridge, it probably ought to be that one.

Smith was, in fact, a keen and intelligent observer and deserves great credit for his work. His thesis of slower decompression was the key to the puzzle. The only problem was he did not carry it anywhere near far enough.

So by that standard, at a depth of sixty-five feet in April of 1872, every man coming up from the New York caisson should have spent at least twenty minutes in the lock, instead of two or three as was the average, or five or six as Smith urged.

We have brought machinery to a pitch of perfection that fifty years ago could not have been imagined; but in the presence of political corruption, we seem as helpless as idiots. The East River Bridge is a crowning triumph of mechanical skill; but to get it built a leading citizen of Brooklyn had to carry to New York sixty thousand dollars in a carpet bag to bribe a New York alderman. The human soul that thought out the great bridge is prisoned in a crazed and broken body that lies bed-fast, and could only watch it grow by peering through a telescope. Nevertheless, the weight of the immense mass is estimated and adjusted for every inch. But the skill of the engineer could not prevent condemned wire from being smuggled into the cable.

The distressing thing about Indian fighting, he had said, was that quite often one shot women and children and when it came time to tend to their wounds one found them to be not at all unlike other women and children.

General GK Warren

It gets a new coat of paint every five years or so and according to the engineers at the New York Department of Public Works, of all the bridges on the East River, it is the one that gives them the least trouble. With normal maintenance, say the engineers, the bridge will last another hundred years. If parts are replaced from time to time—even entire cables if necessary, which would be perfectly possible—then, “As far as we are concerned, it will last forever.” Perhaps it will.