Brooklyn Bridge (1867-1883)

A bridge is not a building, of course. But when its technology merges with poetry, it’s definitely architecture. Like the ancient Roman aqueducts or imposing marble monuments, people seem to know it when they see it.

Ice

In an apparently apocryphal story, and despite its being a salt water estuary that never fully freezes, the East River was reputed to have frozen solid in the winters of 1852 and 1867, allowing the giddy pleasure of ice skaters racing to the opposite bank and keeping the ferry boats firmly locked in their slips. Also, it was reported that angry workers were kept from their jobs on the other bank and it became a hotly debated monetary issue.

What probably happened was that the ferries were ice-jammed into their docks and skaters hopped from one ice floe to another. But while lore was full of hyperbole, the Brooklyn and New York newspapers definitely wrote about the monetary issue from the mid-1850s on.

Opportunity

Not debated at all was the potential financial windfall from a public works project for certain politicians. Contracts, hiring, and simple graft from the millions spent on a bridge seemed to present few political impediments from both dis-connected cities or to Albany and Washington, D.C.

In 1867, the New York Bridge Company, a private stock corporation capitalized at $5,000,000, was signed into legality by both Brooklyn and New York City (now Manhattan Island). Although only $500,000 was to be sold to private citizens forming an “Executive Committee,” that body of the few controlled all hiring and contracts, leaving the cities to foot the bill but have no voice in this disproportionate arrangement. The two City Councils had voted to authorize $1,500,000 from New York and $3,000,000 from Brooklyn. New York City aldermen were probably paid off by the general contractor, William Kingsley. And the “private” citizens were the general contractor himself and politically connected henchmen of Tammany Hall’s “Boss” Tweed. “Boss” Tweed circa 1870

History

But the idea of crossing the East River with a bridge or tunnel began as early as 1800. The technology of the time, however, meant that water traffic would be disrupted or even eliminated with a floating pontoon or dam.

In the years since, Brooklyn had grown into a separate large city becoming a major location for New York City’s workforce. Combined with the political will of the cities and the vision of one famously taciturn engineer, this led to one of the most influential and surprisingly beautiful spans ever constructed.

Several suspension bridges had been built in the early 19th century, most notably those crossing over Wales’s Menai Strait in 1826 and Scotland’s Esk River in 1828. But their much shorter spans were hung with iron cables and chains. Then, the “Bessemer Process” patented in 1856 sent steel prices plunging and John Augustus Roebling’s steel cable business was able to take full advantage of a new and bigger market. Menai Strait Bridge 1826

Roebling

In 1867, Roebling had just finished the suspension bridge over the Ohio River in Cincinnati. In that year, the New York State Capitol at Albany had named him to be the Chief Engineer of a new bridge over the East River and shortly later, so had the U.S. government.

Roebling had thought about spanning the East River for years. And the one consistent idea he had was that it would be a cable suspension bridge.

He had designed the whole bridge before being named, though, with several drawings for the two towers; one idea being Egyptian. But, in the end, the final designs were locked in for two 267-foot-tall granite supports above the waterline, two vaguely Gothic pointed arches in each of the granite towers under which roadways passed and limestone stacks sitting on concrete-filled caissons on bedrock beneath the water. John A. Roebling circa 1866

His new title would be a short-lived honor as John Roebling died in an accident while surveying the Brooklyn dock and the placement of its tower in July of 1869.

(Far left) Cincinnati’s John A. Roebling suspension bridge 1866 (Near left) John A. Roebling suspension bridge tower 1866

Washington

His 32-year-old son, Washington, himself a practiced engineer of cable bridges during the Civil War, also possessed the last name that would guarantee the faith this project required.

Washington was then quickly named the Chief Engineer but it was his wife, Emily Warren, who would be one of the most important figures in its construction. Realized somewhat later, the fact that she had studied engineering and that her married name was also Roebling helped enormously and may have also supported the belief the ambitious project could be done at all. Washington Roebling circa 1865

Washington was more versed in designing caissons than was his father. And the Brooklyn foundation was not only the first major construction project of the bridge to be visible but also the first time young Roebling had actually built one.

Graft

By 1871, though, the political graft and contract overages had begun to fall apart on both sides of the river. The circuitous payments to the Tweed ring in New York and the agreements with the bridge’s general contractor, William Kingsley of Brooklyn, were exposed as the payoffs they were.

Engineering

Called an “upside-down coffin,” each caisson, resembling an enormous cookie cutter, was built of Georgia pine in a shipyard upstream and sailed downriver on the compressed air inside to an area just above the foundation spot. The idea was to then stack limestone blocks on its roof; evenly sink it to the bottom; manually dig out the soil while its sharp ironclad sides cut into the sand to drop further down to bedrock; and then pump in concrete as the base for each tower.

New York caisson section circa 1870

Plans, however, don’t often work in the face of reality. Unfortunately, the bottom of the East River was not uniformly lined with sand. Under the Brooklyn side for its tower, various sizes of hard boulders shared the riverbed with deep veins of clay preventing the cast-iron “shoe” along the outer walls of the caisson from cutting down to bedrock at an even level.

In several instances the compressed air inside the slightly uneven container then spectacularly blew out and water rushed into the chamber. Sometimes the dug-out material often jammed the lifting buckets inside water-filled chimneys. But the worst nightmare of all was fire in its ceiling that almost ruined the whole project and nearly killed Washington Roebling from the “bends” in the ensuing battle.

Caissons

After a little more than a year, the Brooklyn caisson was finished as concrete indeed filled the open work chambers. And, amazingly, no one died inside and only three men were lost in an outdoor accident.

However, the slightly bigger New York caisson had to go much deeper and farther out into the river. While the Brooklyn tower caisson only descended to 44 feet under the water at high tide, the New York tower caisson ultimately descended to over 78 feet and the compressed air inside subjected the men digging to unimaginable pressure. Brooklyn tower circa 1871

Now known as the bends, the term at the time, “Caisson Disease,” subjected the men to excruciating pain in their limbs as they exited. It also became an important early test case for the syndrome, providing research for what would soon be an easily treated problem.

Not only did the New York caisson need to increase the inside air pressure the lower it went, the bottom of the East River at this point was covered in two hundred years and two feet of disgusting waste sediment that filled the caisson with its smell as the men dug through.

By May 18, 1872, and after two deaths from Caisson Disease, Roebling decided to stop before he reached the uneven bedrock. The sand itself had compacted to such a degree that it resembled hard rock anyway. The wooden New York caisson held the crushing weight of 53,000 tons of limestone blocks sitting above even before concrete had filled the work chambers.

Changes

Roebling, though, having entered the chambers below numerous times, was stricken with the Caisson Disease to such a degree that he rarely went to the work sites again. And after a therapeutic trip to Germany with Emily and a short return to Brooklyn, they settled back in his boyhood home in Trenton, New Jersey.

As the Boss Tweed ring had collapsed, in 1874 and 1875 the state capitol of Albany rewrote the original corporate charter awarding the cities of New York and Brooklyn the entire ownership (and liabilities) of the bridge. The now obviously unequal “Executive Committee” and its lucrative revenues directed to the politically connected was dissolved to be replaced by real engineers.

Towers

Though digging inside either caisson had been dangerous work, so, too, was laying the increasingly higher masonry of the two towers. In lifting granite blocks up from the ground assembled from 20 different quarries in Maine, the only differences from the building of the pyramids 4,500 years earlier was the use of pulleys and steel cable.

Brooklyn tower view circa 1878

By July 1876, both towers and anchorages were completed and the spinning of the steel test cables had begun. But the cost in lives lost after the towers had reached their 267-foot height was considered dear as a dozen men were reported to have died from falls or other gruesome accidents.

The elder John A. Roebling had earlier designed the four major cables of 15¾-inch diameter to consist of 19 strands each with nearly 290 steel wires inside. Surprisingly, the New Jersey wire company of the Roebling family had been frozen out of the competition for the steel cables and an inferior Brooklyn company won the final suspension wire contract in an earlier agreement. But it was revealed after several strands had been hung that the steel wire was slightly defective and that the owner of the Brooklyn company had financially benefitted from the inferior wire substituting for good wire in the contract. The Brooklyn company was then summarily dismissed. Cable wrapping circa 1879

Additional wire was ordered for the cables and the Roebling company had won a special contract for wrapping them. Together with the vertical suspenders, the strengthened steel bridge trusses and the Roebling trademark diagonal stays also supporting the roadbed, later engineers have felt the bridge became nearly over-designed for safety standards.

Emily Because Washington Roebling could only watch the bridge’s progress from a spyglass out the window of his new Brooklyn home on Columbia Heights, his more than capable wife, Emily, transcribed his dictated letters to the assistant engineers and sometimes appeared at the work sites. That she was deemed a “clever woman” by the press was a sexist slam of the era but her charm and the fact she also carried the name, “Roebling,” apparently endeared the men to her. And Washington assumed a somewhat mythic status among the workers as few of them had even seen him. The two mayors of Brooklyn and New York, however, were not among Washington Roebling’s greatest admirers. By 1882, and due to the bridge’s many changes, the cost had risen to more than $13 million and the board of trustees threatened to demote him. Emily Warren Roebling circa 1896

The mayors and some of the trustees were politicians who couldn’t understand the scientific process but could certainly count noses and overages. However, all Roebling’s assistant engineers were baffled at the contempt for their boss and let the mayors know it. Roebling then remained as “Chief Engineer” till the bridge was finished in the next year.

Fireworks

On May 24, 1883, and after Emily had been the first woman to cross it in a carriage, the bridge opened to a riot of parades and fireworks. In all, it had cost over $15 million with perhaps up to $3 million stolen. Officially, 20 men had lost their lives building it though it was whispered that there were actually twice as many resulting deaths.

The Brooklyn Bridge was John and Washington Roebling’s greatest work. Its years-long construction also marked the unheralded partnership of Washington’s wife. And that it still awes us shows the power of architecture...as well as one particular woman. Opening night fireworks 1883

The Brooklyn Bridge has achieved a starring role in bridge jokes and photo ops of politicians striding underneath its Gothic openings for a reason. Though New York eventually saw longer cable spans and the Golden Gate in the next century and on the other side of the continent was even more magnificent, no bridge was as great a leap for its era or instantly achieved such status as a city icon. With its load-bearing granite towers and its steel cables and trusses, it may also have punctuated the end of the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the Modern Age.