The Great Bridge (68 page)

A week or so later Hewitt wrote again to ask for the names of all those men he ought to “particularize” in his oration and for a brief explanation of what their individual contributions had been. This request Roebling willingly answered.

For Emily it was as busy as any time since the bridge began. The reception would be all her doing. She had drawn up the guest list, decided on the design and wording of the invitation, commissioned the bust of her husband as well as an oil portrait, ordered flowers and bunting to decorate the house, planned her own entourage to attend the ceremonies, and did the best she could to protect her husband from any more last-minute nervous strain than was absolutely necessary. She was also making arrangements to vacate the house almost immediately after the reception. She had rented the house, starting in June. She, her son, and husband would return to Newport for the summer.

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.

Her own party would ride in twenty-five carriages. She would be in the first of them, in the same victoria in which she had crossed the bridge. She would ride with her son, John A. Roebling, II. Following would be Ferdinand Roebling and his wife, Charles Roebling and his wife, Professor and Mrs. Methfessel, Emily’s brother William Warren from Washington, her sister-in-law Elvira Stewart, her sister, Mrs. Hook, and Eddie Roebling, now a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor living in New York. The rest were mostly personal friends.

“I wish you would make one of my party of ladies to attend the public ceremony of opening the big bridge,” she wrote to a Mrs. William G. Wilson of New York. “I want the ladies to meet at my house at one o’clock on Thursday and go in a procession down to the bridge—sort of opposition to the Presidential procession on the New York side you know!

“Wear short dresses and bonnet—as I shall even at the reception. I want you to help me receive after the public performance is over.”

The mail arriving at the house was full of notes of congratulations and grateful acceptances for the reception. On May 18 came still one more letter to Roebling from Abram Hewitt. To the Chief Engineer it must have seemed one last absurd insult to end on. Hewitt had hoped to be able to pay his respects following the ceremony, he said. “But as I am to dine with the Mayor it is barely possible that the interval will not be sufficient, in which case I pray you and Mrs. Roebling to accept the will for the deed.” Then he said, “Will you kindly give me the full name of Mrs. Roebling…”

On Saturday night, May 19, to test the lights before the opening day, the hidden dynamos were turned on, and people returning to Brooklyn by ferry between eleven and midnight were suddenly astonished to behold overhead a great display of light across the bridge from city to city. Whether they knew it or not, they were looking up at the future—steel and electricity.

ESTIMATES
were that fully fifty thousand people from out of town came into the city that morning by train But probably that many again were arriving by boat. The Mary Powell had all she could carry. A Fall River steamer that docked at eleven had six hundred passengers on board and the boat from Stonington had that number or more. One iron steamer from New Haven carried a thousand people. How many private boats and “special excursions” came into the harbor was anyone’s guess. By midday all the major hotels were sold out.

The weather was perfect. “A fairer day for the ceremony could not have been chosen. The sky was cloudless, and the heat from the brightly shining sun was tempered by a cool breeze.” Countless flags snapped overhead all up and down Fifth Avenue and along Broadway, where the President was to pass. Buildings were draped in red, white, and blue, with banners and bunting floating from rooftops and window ledges, and most stores had some sort of display in their windows. In Madison Square, across from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where the President and several of his Cabinet had spent the night, thousands of people were waiting, milling about under the trees or walking round and round the enormous torch and hand of the Statue of Liberty, which had been brought up from Philadelphia after the close of the Centennial.

At nine the fence across the Chatham Street entrance to the bridge had been torn down by workmen and replaced by a solid line of police. In another hour it was almost impossible to get within two blocks of the bridge. The streets leading to the river were packed solid with people. City Hall Park and Printing House Square were overrun. Every available rooftop and window was filled and along the river front there was scarcely a place left to stand.

The huge wagons that hauled milk and produce into the city had arrived as usual during the night, but loaded instead with country people, as many as twenty to a wagon, and now with their sunburned faces and bewildered looks they stood out plainly in the sea of people. “One moment they were clambering clumsily up the sides of stoops or balancing themselves insecurely on fences, and next they were pushing their way, with half awe-struck faces, through the crowds in the gutter out into the street itself,” wrote a reporter. “The crowd impressed them with awe, the buildings and flags with admiration, but the consuming desire of their heart was to see the President, the Governor, and other political magnates.”

There were as well, it seems, an abnormally large number of “symmetrical, shapely, graceful, elegant, neat, bright-eyed and comely women in brilliant costumes and resplendent colors,” and these remarkable creatures were “pushed, jostled, and inextricably mixed with ungainly, uncouth, and ill-favored women.” And in turn, they were all swayed back and forth and “jumbled up” with ragged men, with “rural swains” in frock coats and green ties, and with the unperturbed, self-contained New Yorker in dark suit and derby. “Embroidery, lace, fringe, trimmings and skirts were rent and torn by the friction of the crowd,” and the large corsages, which many of the women wore when they started out that morning, were, after a half hour’s experience in the crowd, crushed and torn to pieces. And everywhere, with or without adults in attendance, were “myriads of all sorts of children,” none of whom, for some miraculous reason or other, was trampled to death.

Vendors hawked gumdrops, bananas, flags, pictures of John A. and Washington Roebling, bridge buttons and commemorative medals that sold for fifteen cents. It was a great day too for circulating all kinds of advertisements. Thousands upon thousands of pamphlets, fans, and handbills having the bridge as a decorative element or part of the text were handed out and tucked away in dresser drawers later on as mementos of the historic occasion. By noon, down by the bridge itself, the blue tickets issued by the Bridge Company were selling for five dollars apiece. 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.

Schools were officially open in New York that day, but it would have been difficult to find a classroom that was not empty. And although the Stock Exchange too was open, the half-dozen brokers still on duty there had little to do but watch the visitors in the galleries. Elsewhere any business not closed by noon had been left in the charge of a few lonely clerks.

At the Custom House, Chester A. Arthur’s old domain, things were extremely quiet. The Post Office was open, but it too was as still as Sunday. Federal courts were closed and the only people inside the County Courthouse on Chambers Street were twelve jurors who had been locked up all night trying to agree on a verdict. At noon, gongs clanged on the floors of the Produce, the Cotton, the Maritime, the Mercantile, and the Coffee exchanges and all business promptly ceased. In less than an hour these buildings were empty, their doors locked. About the only place in town where business continued as usual was Castle Garden. It was remarked that only a storm on the North Atlantic ever stemmed the tide of immigration.

Why there was quite so much excitement in New York, some observers were at a loss to explain. For Brooklyn people the bridge had a great deal of importance obviously enough, but for these throngs, the
Times
noted, “there could have been no special cause of congratulation, since not one in one thousand of them will be likely to have occasion to use the new structure except for curiosity.”

No one will ever know when or how the story started. But possibly it was that morning, while the city waited for Chester A. Arthur to emerge from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, that one or more of those numberless countrymen in the crowd “purchased” the Brooklyn Bridge from some new-found city friend and thereby made an everlasting contribution to American folklore. Or perhaps it was one of the dark-eyed, mustachioed men being processed at Castle Garden, some brand-new aspiring American with his belongings tied up in string, who at the end of his very first walk in the New World that bright morning arrived somewhere in the neighborhood of the bridge in time to be taken. Or maybe the story simply started in the imagination of some contemplative onlooker who, after studying the people pressing by, concluded the large part of them would believe anything, buy anything, even the Brooklyn Bridge itself.

The sun was barely up in Brooklyn before the streets were swarming with people. Virtually every single house and building downtown had a flag flying from its rooftop or hung from a window. Or if not a flag then a string of Chinese lanterns. Along Fulton Street and on the Heights most buildings were covered with streamers and bunting. There were flags in all 120 windows of City Hall. The dome of the courthouse was “gorgeous in its dress of flying colors.” In City Hall Square the decoration that attracted the most attention was one in front of the Park Theater showing a straggling village of Brooklyn in 1746, the primitive ferry of 1814, then the completed bridge of 1883, and after that a view of the East River as it would look in 1983 with a hundred bridges spanning it. Joralemon Street on the Heights, Remsen, Montague, and Pierrepont, the streets running toward the river, were banked with flags and bunting. And in the little parks at the ends of these streets, at Columbia Heights, the trees were filled with Chinese lanterns and most of the biggest houses had lanterns strung all the way from basement to roof.

Every store window along Fulton, from the ferry to City Hall, on both sides of the street, and every doorway were decorated. A jeweler had made a miniature bridge with gold chain for the cables. A florist had made a bridge eight feet long, complete with bridge trains and boats passing below, all of flowers. Store windows carried framed portraits of the Chief Engineer and his father, Henry Cruse Murphy, Mayor Low, and General Slocum. And a sign in one window recalled something said a long time before: “Babylon had her hanging garden, Egypt her pyramid, Athens her Acropolis, Rome her Athenaeum; so Brooklyn has her Bridge.”

On the Heights the two most elaborately decorated private homes were those of Seth Low and Washington Roebling, the two places where the President was to be a guest. Clusters of silk flags were in the mayor’s windows and over his spacious doorway hung the flag of Brooklyn. Down the street, toward the bridge, the entire front of the Chief Engineer’s house was covered with flags, shields, flowers, and the coat of arms of New York and Brooklyn. Over the street, suspended high enough for carriages to pass beneath, was one immense American flag.

The river in the distance below was probably the most arresting spectacle of all. The water was actually a bright blue and it looked that morning as though every variety of ship afloat had gathered in a great, elongated flotilla that extended from the bay to somewhere upstream beyond the bridge. Flags were flying from the masts of ships tied up at the wharves below and along the opposite shore. “It was as if the forest of masts had blossomed beneath the influence of the young spring sunshine into a thousand gorgeous dyes. Everywhere the eye glanced there floated from, and almost concealed the network of rigging, flags and banners and signals and streamers…. All the vessels anchored in the stream were likewise a mass of fluttering color above their dark hulls.”

Sometime before noon the Atlantic Squadron came steaming up from the bay and into the river below the bridge, with the flagship, the
Tennessee,
anchoring about on a line with the Wall Street ferry. The others were strung out behind in a line reaching nearly as far as Governors Island and they too were covered with bunting and their crews of bluejackets could be seen quite plainly from the Brooklyn shore. One man later described how the gold trimmings on the officers’ uniforms flashed in the sun.

The ferries kept churning back and forth to New York the whole morning and were packed with people. On the Fulton Ferry it was just about impossible to move an arm or leg. Hundreds of people, it seems, had decided that the best possible way to witness the day’s events was to stick right on board and keep riding back and forth.

About noon there was a great surge toward Sands Street. Within half an hour at least ten thousand people had crammed into the narrow streets near the Brooklyn terminal, and a force of several hundred police, formed in a hollow square in front of the building, had all it could do to hold back the crowd. As in New York, vendors were everywhere, only here there seemed more of them, and along with pictures and commemorative medals, they were selling sheet music about the bridge and a variety of little facsimiles done in metal, wax, or confection. “On the whole it was a good-natured crowd,” wrote one observer.

Brooklyn’s part of the actual ceremonies got under way from City Hall at forty minutes past noon. The Twenty-third Regiment band in bright-red coats, followed by the Twenty-third Regiment in white helmets and blue coats, followed by a detachment of Fifth Artillery from Fort Hamilton and Marines from the Navy Yard, who in turn were followed by two hundred and some city officials, bridge trustees, and special guests, all in a body, led by the young mayor in a tall silk hat and followed by Mrs. Washington Roebling and her party in carriages, headed off down Remsen Street in the direction of the river, crossed Clinton, turned right at the next corner, onto Henry, and marched to the bridge. Their entire route was lined with crowds four and five deep. There were people looking down from rooftops and packed onto door stoops as mounted officers went clattering by and as one by one a great many familiar Brooklyn faces passed in review—ex-Comptroller Ludwig Semler…Judge McCue…Alfred Barnes…James Stranahan…William Kingsley…At Sands Street, where the police had cleared a path for them, all but a few of the civilians went directly into the station building, while the Twenty-third Regiment, Seth Low, William Kingsley, and a dozen others, at the command of “Route Step,” marched out onto the bridge.

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.

Grover Cleveland, the portly new governor, was also there, and he, of course, would be the next President, but nobody knew that then and few even speculated on the prospect. In fact, if there was excitement about Cleveland’s presence that May morning, it was mostly because people were anxious to see what the man looked like. The only other noteworthy figure to look for was Abram Hewitt, who was never exactly a crowd-pleaser.

But the strapping Arthur was considered a New Yorker and he looked like a President if any man ever did. When he stepped into the sunshine from the main entrance of the Fifth Avenue Hotel at twelve forty, the response from the crowd was overwhelming. On his arm was Mayor Edson, an erect, gray, scholarly-looking man in gold-rimmed spectacles. A few steps behind were Grover Cleveland and Henry Slocum, all smiles and arm in arm now.

Arthur was dressed in black frock coat, white tie, and a flat-brimmed black beaver hat that he kept taking off in response to the ovation. “The women in the crowd raised their hands above the heads of the men and waved their handkerchiefs,” wrote one of the dozens of reporters covering the event, “and from the swarming windows on either hand similar feminine signals of hearty welcome met the Chief Magistrate’s eye as he stepped into his open carriage.” Cleveland went unrecognized for several minutes, but then he stood up in his carriage and lifted his hat, and the people, having concluded who he was, responded wholeheartedly.