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

by David McCullough

When the perfected East River bridge shall permanently and uninterruptedly connect the two cities, the daily thousands who cross it will consider it a sort of natural and inevitable phenomenon, such as the rising and setting of the sun, and they will unconsciously overlook the preliminary difficulties surmounted before the structure spanned the stream, and will perhaps undervalue the indomitable courage, the absolute faith, the consummate genius which, assured the engineer’s triumph. —THOMAS KINSELLA, IN THE BROOKLYN EAGLE

But if in New York—even in New York—men of principle, men of integrity, education, and property, could rise up and triumph over a Tweed, then perhaps

When the digging began, the work proved nowhere near so difficult as it had been in Brooklyn, but much more disagreeable, for the caisson was standing in the middle of what for years had been New York’s principal dumping ground. Moreover, a street sewer was still emptying into the river close by. The ground itself was a clay silt turned black by sewage and thick, with the putrid remains of animals, garbage, and what Farrington called “sewage abominations.”

Up on top the sand blasted out with such velocity that it became a serious problem.

Once, a man passing by in a rowboat, with one hand resting on the gunwale, had the end of a finger shot off by a pebble fired from a sand pipe.

Had Smith installed such a device at the New York caisson, and had it been used in the way he describes, there would have been little or no suffering from the bends by anyone, there would have been no deaths, and the subsequent life of Washington Roebling and the story of the bridge would have been very different.

There was great shouting from down below, and up ahead, on top of the tower, people were waving hats and handkerchiefs. Then all at once, as he went swinging out over the housetops between the anchorage and the tower, Farrington freed himself from the rope about his chest and stood up on the seat. Holding on first with one hand, then the other, he lifted his hat in response to the continuing ovation. Then he sat down again. People were running through the streets beneath him now, shouting and cheering as they ran. He waved, he blew them kisses. Sailing steadily along all the while, his course was nearly horizontal at first, like that of a heavy bird taking flight, because of the sag in the rope. His light coat blew open and began fluttering in the wind. And then he was beyond the sag and climbing sharply,

“This is the same General Slocum,” he wrote, “who joined with the request that I absent myself from any meeting of the board because my presence may embarrass Mr. Kingsley’s proposed operations of putting a couple of millions in his pocket, millions which have not yet reached their destination.” His “patience at an end,” Roebling said flatly that General Superintendent William Kingsley had been paid $175,000 for work he had never done—for work that he, Roebling, had in fact done—and that it had been Henry Slocum who stood up in the conference room years back and exclaimed that no man could name a sum that would compensate so eminent a man as Mr. Kingsley for the services he had rendered.

It took Cheops twenty years to build his pyramid, but if he had had a lot of Trustees, contractors, and newspaper reporters to worry him, he might not have finished it by that time. The advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization.

In 1944 the elevated trains stopped running over the bridge and the old iron terminal buildings were dismantled. A team of engineers began a painstaking examination of the entire structure to see what ought to be done about it. When they had concluded their studies two years later, it was announced that all the bridge needed was a new coat of paint.