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

by David McCullough

“I suppose this will be the last of the kind you will undertake.” “I don’t know,” Roebling answered. “If I get well there is lots of big work in the world to do yet.” And with that the interview ended.

the New York World, which had changed hands just the month before. Jay Gould had sold the paper to young Joseph Pulitzer of St. Louis, and the new owner not only considered the Brooklyn Bridge a historic event, in the way the Eads bridge had been, but thought the World’s previous hostility to the mammoth new structure was just plain bad publishing. The World now loved the bridge.

Indeed, the only people who seemed displeased with the arrangements being made were some of the more militant Irish, who in mid-April had suddenly realized that the 24th happened also to be Queen Victoria’s birthday and so began angrily protesting the date selected. The

The Tribune answered that “it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to fix upon a day that did not commemorate something or other unpleasant for Ireland,” and as the appointed day drew nearer, there was talk of Irish fanatics, “Dynamite Patriots,” attempting to blow up the bridge.

People had been getting onto the bridge for several months now, despite the precautions taken to stop them. One evening in April a mob of boys from New York had broken through the barriers at Chatham Street, crossed over the bridge, and started hurling rocks down on the houses near the Brooklyn tower.

There were other things he found annoying. He had been receiving inquiries, for example, from Abram Hewitt, who wanted help with his speech. In a letter written in early May (a letter in which Hewitt, or his secretary, misspelled Roebling’s name), Hewitt said he intended to take up “the social and political considerations involved in the creation of new avenues of transportation.” He wanted the engineer to send him “comparative examples of great engineering works, which would show that by scientific appliances the cost of the bridge is very much below what would be possible in any preceding age.” He wanted a table of wages from Roebling and other technical information. Hewitt planned to present the bridge as a symbol of progress. But the builder of the bridge did not see it that way. Or perhaps he was in no mood to be of any assistance to Abram Hewitt. In any event, Roebling’s answer went as follows: To build his pyramid Cheops packed some pounds of rice into the stomachs of innumerable Egyptians and Israelites. We today would pack some pounds of coal inside steam boilers to do the same thing, and this might be cited as an instance of the superiority of modern civilization over ancient brute force. But when referred to the sun, our true standard of reference, the comparison is naught, because to produce these few pounds of coal required a thousand times more solar energy than to produce the few pounds of rice. We are simply taking advantage of an accidental circumstance. I...

The reception had been her idea. If her husband could not participate in the day Seth Low and the others were planning, then she would bring them to him—the trustees, the mayors, the Governor, the President of the United States.

There is no official figure for the number of men killed building the bridge. The Bridge Company compiled no list, kept no precise records on the subject, which is characteristic of the age. In a booklet made up from his Cooper Union talks and published after the bridge was built, Farrington says between thirty and forty men died in the work, which is especially interesting if it is remembered that Emily Roebling may have done Farrington’s writing for him. The Chief Engineer and William Kingsley, however, both said twenty had died and from the deaths reported in the papers and mentioned here and there in the minutes of Bridge Company meetings that seems to be a realistic figure.

Apart from any interest he had in the lighting contract, Thomas Edison was enormously fascinated by the bridge and spent hours watching its progress. He also took some extraordinary movies, among the earliest he made, of the final weeks of construction.

Liquor stores and saloons were doing three times their normal business. And at the Police Gazette building a riot was under way. Better than a thousand “sporting men” having responded to publisher Richard Fox’s invitation, the place was packed to the rooftop. Already the “guests” had consumed several hundred bottles of champagne and whiskey, devoured a barbecued ox, and were busily smashing up the furniture for fun when the police arrived to clear the building.

When the Erie Canal was opened in the autumn of 1825, there were four former Presidents of the United States present in New York City for the occasion—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—as well as John Quincy Adams, then occupying the White House, and General Andrew Jackson, who would take his place. When the Brooklyn Bridge was opened on May 24, 1883, the main attraction was Chester A. Arthur.

Cleveland was described as having a “wobbling gait,” like a London alderman.

At that point Stranahan was about to introduce Hewitt, the main speaker, apparently having forgotten that Jules Levy, a cornet player, was supposed to be next on the program. But the smiling Levy stepped forward all the same and as the Times reported “put the great multitude in a good humor” by playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Secretary Folger was seen to wake up and on the last note the crowd cheered so mightily that Levy did “Hail Columbia” as an encore. Again there was an ovation, but when Levy looked as though he was going to play still one more time, Stranahan seized him by the arm and led him off the platform. The audience was greatly disappointed by this and Levy looked furious. When Stranahan started to introduce Hewitt, Levy, from off stage, began playing “Yankee-Doodle.” There was a roar of laughter and Chester A. Arthur appeared to be more pleased by this part of the program than any other. Levy took his time on the last notes, while Stranahan, a man with no music in his soul, according to one account, just stood glumly waiting.

In another time and in what would seem another world, on a day when two young men were walking on the moon, a very old woman on Long Island would tell reporters that the public excitement over the feat was not so much compared to what she had seen “on the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Furthermore, the ferries were still in business, to the surprise of people, and would be for a long time to come. The last Brooklyn ferry, between Hamilton Avenue and the Battery, stopped running on June 30, 1942.

They would come from every part of the country, take photographs of it and from it with one of the new Kodak cameras introduced not long after the bridge was finished, or buy some of the stereopticon views that sold by the millions.

To be on the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge on a fine day, about halfway between the two towers, looking over the harbor and the city skyline, was to be at one of the two or three most soul-stirring spots in America, like standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon.

In 1898 with a population of nearly a million people, and still the third-largest city in the United States, Brooklyn had relinquished its independence to become a borough of New York.

By 1930 Brooklyn’s population was greater than that of Manhattan.

In 1931 the George Washington Bridge was completed over the Hudson with a span more than twice that of the Brooklyn Bridge and six years later the Golden Gate Bridge, larger and still more awesome, was built at the opposite end of the continent.

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.

They moved in in 1892. She bought the most expensive carriages and the finest horses, which she insisted always on driving herself, her coachman seated behind her. For a number of years she seems to have had quite a good time. She entertained often and beautifully to judge by some old clippings from the Trenton society columns. She became active in women’s clubs. She studied law at New York University and received her degree. She worked on a book about Cold Spring.3 She went to Europe twice. The first time they went together, but the second time, in 1896, she went without him and to Russia as well, where she was one of the few Americans present at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra.

He was always available for his opinion and his opinion carried some weight apparently. Once when his brothers were all for selling out to U.S. Steel, he said no and that was that.

For five years after Emily’s death he lived alone with the house and servants. The wire business in this time became the biggest in the world. The demand seemed unending—for telegraph wire, baling wire, electrical wire, for wire cloth, for bridge cable wire, for the construction of the Panama Canal, for wire rope for cable roads, coal mines, ships, oil rigs, logging machinery, tramways, elevators. The Otis Elevator Company was buying nearly all its cable from the Roeblings. The sons of John A. Roebling had become millionaires many times over. Washington Roebling’s own estate would be approximately $29 million.

In April 1912 his nephew and namesake, Washington A. Roebling, III, Charles Roebling’s son, went down on the Titanic and the family was news again. An editor of the New York Times wrote to ask if he would be good enough to explain, for the historical record, the part his mother had played in helping John A. Roebling build the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling wrote back, explaining patiently that he was the one who had built the bridge, not his father, and that it was Emily, not his mother, who had been associated “for fourteen long years with the various phases of the work.”

He hated gloves and refused to wear them even in the coldest weather. He disliked automobiles intensely and refused ever to ride in one. Jigsaw puzzles became his “narcotic,” but never satisfied with those to be found in stores, which he considered much too easy, he had his specially made, from large photographs or reproductions of paintings, each puzzle with a thousand to three thousand pieces.

He had also acquired a new companion, a rather disreputable-looking Airedale, a stray he named “Billy Sunday.” It became a common thing to see them come down the long drive as he set off on a walk, a small, fragile old gentleman in pinstripes and boater, advancing slowly, stiffly, the dog trailing at his heels. Or they would stand together in front of his tall iron gate waiting for the trolley. There was no regular stop there but the trolley stopped just the same and dog and master would climb aboard, everybody inside watching. As was widely known, Billy Sunday was the one dog in Trenton with a special pass to ride free on the trolleys. Once Roebling was seated, Billy would slip between his legs and curl up under the seat.

one interview he was asked how he was able to carry on. “Because it’s all in my head,” he answered. “. . . It’s my job to carry the responsibility and you can’t desert your job. You can’t slink out of life or out of the work life lays on you.”

All of the bridges built by John A. Roebling are gone now except two—the Cincinnati Bridge and an aqueduct over the Delaware built in 1848 above Port Jervis, New York, which has been converted into an automobile bridge and is the oldest suspension bridge in America.

Brooklyn Bridge Vital Statistics1