The Great Bridge (67 page)

The man was from the
Union,
Brooklyn’s Republican paper, which had recently made the bridge the dominant pictorial element in its logotype. His name is not known, but he wrote later that this was the first time he had seen Roebling in eleven years.

Emily received him in the library. Colonel Roebling was resting in his room upstairs, she said. He had spent the morning sitting for a sculptor who was doing a bust for the opening ceremonies and he was feeling a little tired just now.

When the reporter inquired for the Colonel’s health, she told him not to be surprised if he found her husband looking a good deal healthier than he might expect. “He is not so sick as people imagine,” she said. “The difficulty with him is that it wearies him to talk for any extended time. Any unusual exertion is sure to be followed by prostration, and the effort of talking or listening for any extended time has a very debilitating effect.”

The reporter wanted to know if Colonel Roebling would be taking part in the grand opening. No, he would not, she said. The excitement would be too much for him. “After the ceremonial at Sands Street and the procession are over, we will receive our friends here,” she continued. “Colonel Roebling will take part in the reception as long as he can stand the strain…”

She handed him an engraved invitation, a large white card from Tiffany & Co. In the upper left-hand corner was a small portrait of Roebling, resting on a laurel branch. His name and professional title were on a scroll underneath. To the right of the portrait, extending across the top of the card, as though seen in the distance, was the bridge, “in perfect detail,” as the reporter noted. The invitation itself read as follows:

THE EAST RIVER BRIDGE
will be opened to the public
Thursday, May twenty-fourth, at 2 o’clock.

Col. & Mrs. Washington A. Roebling
request the honor of your company
after the opening ceremony until seven o’clock.

110 Columbia Heights
Brooklyn

The reporter asked if Colonel Roebling was likely to undertake any other great work, now that the bridge was finished. According to the article he wrote later, “Mrs. Roebling elevated her brows and said decisively, ‘Oh, no. This is his last as well as his greatest work. He will need a long rest after this is over. He needs it and he has certainly earned it.’”

Then she excused herself to go upstairs to see if her husband was ready to receive him. When she returned, she asked if he would please follow her.

“The writer found the Chief Engineer of the greatest suspension bridge in the world walking about his room and wearing a light spring overcoat and a soft felt hat,” he wrote. On a side table he noted “an imposing array of medicine phials.” But Roebling did indeed look better than he had expected—much better. He had put on weight and was noticeably fuller in the face and his hair and beard were streaked with gray. He was much paler, too, than he had been, and when he came forward to shake hands, his step appeared “short and a little uncertain.” But to judge by appearances, time had not been altogether unkind to Roebling, the reporter decided. “Seen at a standstill or sitting in an easy chair, with one leg thrown over the back of another, no one would suppose that this robust-looking gentleman, with massive forehead, without a wrinkle, and keen gray eye that lights up wonderfully in conversation, was a victim to one of the most terrible diseases known to medical science.” It was only in the lines around the eyes, the reporter said, that Roebling’s face revealed any traces of past suffering.

The three of them sat down and the only thing serious touched on in the conversation that followed was the question of locomotives on the bridge, a subject about which there was still some curiosity in Brooklyn but little reliable information to go by.

“There will be no difficulty about running such locomotives as they use on the elevated railroad in New York across the bridge,” said Roebling, who seemed to be having no difficulty speaking. “It was built to sustain them, and there would not be a particle of risk in it.” If anyone wanted to transfer two or three passenger cars from a railroad in Brooklyn to one in New York, using a small locomotive, that too would be possible. The bridge had been built to sustain such weight. But he was still “unalterably opposed” to full-sized locomotives. The reporter wanted to know about Pullman cars.

“Oh, don’t say that you would not consent to Pullman cars,” Emily Roebling said. “You know you promised Mr. Stranahan that Pullman cars could go across.”

At which, according to the reporter, Roebling laughed and replied, “Do you know what Mr. Stranahan wants? He wants a Pullman car to go right up to his back yard. He wants to be able to step into it at his house, ride across the bridge and up to Saratoga without changing his seat. That’s what he wants.”

Then, according to the reporter’s account, Roebling suddenly began to look very tired. Perhaps he had said too much. “I congratulate you on the successful termination of your great work,” the reporter said, standing up to leave. “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.

Plans for the great occasion were now complete. According to all accounts it was to be the biggest celebration in New York since the opening of the Erie Canal. For Brooklyn, said the
Times,
it was certain to be “the greatest gala day in the history of that moral suburb.” It was to be known as “The People’s Day.”

Mayor Seth Low was the one chiefly behind the idea. He had proclaimed it an official holiday in Brooklyn. He would decorate and illuminate his own home, he said, and urged all his neighbors to do the same. He called on Brooklyn business establishments to close for the day and already most of them had sent out neatly printed cards saying they would. Schools would be out, most stores would be closed.

About thirteen thousand tickets from Tiffany had been issued by the trustees. Seven thousand of them, a pale-blue color and the size of a theater thicket, were good for admittance to the bridge on the opening day. The rest, large, stiff white cards with an engraved view of the bridge, were for the ceremonies to be held inside the Brooklyn terminal.

President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, and their parties were to walk over the bridge from New York, escorted by Mayor Franklin Edson, the Seventh Regiment, and a seventy-five piece band. They would be met on the bridge by an official delegation from Brooklyn and proceed to the Sands Street terminal for the formal ceremonies. James Stranahan would preside. William Kingsley, as acting president of the bridge trustees, would formally present the bridge to Mayors Edson and Low, each of whom was expected to make a few brief remarks. Then the “principal orations” of the day were to be delivered by two gentlemen selected as fitting representatives of their home cities, Abram Hewitt for New York and for Brooklyn the Reverend Dr. Storrs. After a private reception at the home of the Chief Engineer, there was to be a dinner for the President and the Governor down the street at the home of Mayor Low. A fireworks display at the bridge would begin at eight and would be followed by a public reception for the President at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

The North Atlantic Squadron—the
Tennessee, Kearsarge, Saratoga, Yantic, and Vandalia
—had been ordered to Brooklyn to take part in the celebration. The
Minnesota
had already arrived and was anchored off the Battery. Guns would be fired from the Navy Yard, from Governors Island, from the warships. A theatrical promoter, Commodore Joe Tooker, had chartered the mammoth excursion steamer
Grand Republic
and planned to steam up and down beneath the bridge and fire guns from his deck as well. “Bell-ringing, steam-whistling, and band-playing are among the incidental attractions offered the patrons of this boat,” the papers reported.

Brooklyn wharf owners were inviting select friends to spend the evening with them on their piers. Innumerable New York business firms with offices overlooking the river were inviting favorite customers to watch from their windows. Janitors in the tallest buildings on Printing House Square were overrun by applicants for admission to their roofs. All tenants in the Morse Building, at Nassau and Beekman Streets, had been told they could watch from the roof. The tops of the Temple Court Building on the opposite corner and the Mills Building nearby were also to be open. Richard K. Fox, the flamboyant proprietor of the
Police Gazette,
had sent out ten thousand invitations to watch the show from his new building on Franklin Square, thinking possibly several hundred recipients might appear.

Popular interest in all this was considerable, to say the least, and the press made much of it, including 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 Central Labor Union issued a statement calling on “all good men and women in both cities to remember this latest insult of the would-be aristocratic element in our midst.” 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.

The idea of a grand celebration did not much appeal to Washington Roebling either. Kingsley, too, Roebling understood, was of a like mind and had suggested to the trustees that once everything was in order they simply put up a sign saying “The Bridge Is Open.” But the other trustees had been against that, and Seth Low especially. As early as March a committee had been formed to make the arrangements.

When he heard later what was being planned, Roebling had grown extremely uneasy. If there were to be fireworks, he wrote to the trustees, then the bridge must be cleared of all spectators. If there were to be soldiers participating in parades on the main span, then they must not march in step. He was also concerned about how many people might be permitted onto the bridge once the ceremonies were over, and what the consequences might be if a mob ever got out of control.

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. Police converged on them from both ends of the bridge and the boys had shinnied up the suspenders and climbed down under the flooring. “The officers used their clubs in an effective manner,” according to a newspaper account the following morning, “and soon cleared the structure of the roughs.” But the whole incident was a very dangerous sign Roebling said.

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:

It was the sort of thing he had doubtless wished to say to Hewitt for quite some time and that he had somehow refrained from saying to the
Union
reporter. His concept of energy consumption was also well in advance of his time.