Waterfront: A Walk Around Manhattan (41 page)

The Brooklyn Bridge has remained celebrated and cherished, long after its technological achievements have been superseded. It was not the first successful suspension bridge in America; it is no longer the longest in the country, or even necessarily the most beautiful in New York; some, like Le Corbusier, would argue for the George Washington Bridge. Yet it is hard to imagine the GW Bridge receiving the lavish national attention on its hundredth birthday that the Brooklyn Bridge generated on its 1983 centenary. Why has the Brooklyn span remained so alive in the popular culture?

Because it has had the capacity to make itself lovable. Beautiful it may also be, but “lovable” is a different quality; it suggests the knack of inspiring tenderness. If the Brooklyn Bridge began as a magisterial, solitary alpine range connecting the two great cities of Manhattan and Brooklyn, it soon enough had company across the East River: the Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903, the Manhattan Bridge in 1905. These siblings forever gamboling at their elder brother's side, elbowing their raw profiles into view, meant that the Brooklyn Bridge had to be revered for something other than its riparian-spanning properties. Aesthetics and tradition both came to the rescue.

First, aesthetics: the Brooklyn Bridge is, without a doubt, soaringly, stubbornly handsome. There is the elegance of the catenary curve (the natural form taken by any rope or cable suspended from two points) as it swoops down to the center, and then scallops upward toward the towers; the visual cross-thatching of vertical cables and diagonal stays, yielding an effect that has been compared to a harp, a spider's web, angels' wings; the unearthly collision of materials: the airy steel wire of the cables and stays—it was the first bridge to rely solely on steel for such purposes—against the staunch granite towers. Its towers seemed at the time the one opportunity to make a consciously monumental statement. In an architecturally eclectic
period, faced with the option of borrowing from any historical style (neoclassical, Gothic, French Renaissance), its makers chose Gothic for the gateways to the two cities. It was this very dissonance of sleek steel and old-fashioned granite that annoyed Montgomery Schuyler in his early, proto-modernist assessment, “The Brooklyn Bridge as Monument.” After acknowledging that the bridge was perhaps the finest, most enduring structure of the day, Schuyler took issue with the anachronistic heaviness of the Gothic stylings, wishing instead that the towers could have better “revealed” structurally the cables they contained within. It was as though he had in mind a pure steel structure like the George Washington Bridge, which is indeed more harmonious, from a modernist aesthetic viewpoint. But the Brooklyn Bridge is more endearing, more—lovable, precisely because it exemplifies that tension, held in stately balance, between old and new, handmade and industrial, granite and gossamer.

Adding to its endearing qualities are the heroic legends about its fourteen-year construction, which still cling to its girders. That Iliadic tale of the struggle to build the Brooklyn Bridge has been told many times, most definitively in David McCullough's fine book
The Great Bridge:
how the stern, brilliant German immigrant engineer John Augustus Roebling, ex-student of Hegel, having successfully solved the riddle of making suspension bridges safe (maximum stiffness), was offered the assignment to span the East River; how he became its first victim, his toes crushed in a pier accident, leading to tetanus and death; how his son, Washington Roebling, he of calm integrity and superhuman persistence, took over the task, assembled a loyal projects team, mostly fellow alumni from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and set about resourcefully meeting each of the challenges with technological inventions; how they battled the elements and turbulent tides and geological surprises of the East River; how they built two enormous compressed-air foundations, or caissons, each weighing 6 million pounds, and sank them underwater to dredge and anchor the towers; how the laborers, working eight-hour shifts with primitive equipment (no power tools!) in these ill-lit, poorly ventilated, sweltering underwater conditions for two dollars a day, began to suffer from caisson sickness, or “the bends,” which crippled them; how their boss, Washington Roebling, investigating a fire in the caisson, himself con
tracted the illness and became an invalid for life, forced to attend the bridge's construction from his window with a spyglass; how he developed, along with the physical disease, a nervous disorder—a neurotically unsociable manner close to misanthropy; how his devoted wife, Emily, played the “bridge” with his associates and employers, smoothing over public demands for her hus-band's resignation as chief engineer; how gluttonous William M. Tweed, ruler of Tammany Hall, saw this massive public work as a splendid opportunity for graft and almost took it, but the Tweed Ring was exposed and busted in the nick of time; how a corrupt supplier of steel wire, a bigamist mountebank who gained the contract through political kickbacks, managed to smuggle in substandard materials, despite Roebling's orders that every yard of wire be personally inspected; how it didn't matter, finally, because Roebling had already factored in that the bridge be built to six times its necessary strength; how it mattered only symbolically, in that there would always be invisible weaknesses woven into the bridge's near-perfection, just as blood was admixed into its joints and bolts from the deaths of more than twenty workmen.

As Alan Trachtenberg has pointed out in his excellent study,
Brooklyn Bridge:
“For many Americans in 1883, Brooklyn Bridge proved the nation to be healed of its wounds of civil war and again on its true course: the peaceful mastery of nature.” It was the age of engineer-heroes (de Lesseps, Roebling) and engineering feats, and nothing stirred the public's romantic sentiment more than bridges. “Babylon had her hanging garden, Egypt her pyramid, Athens her Acropolis, Rome her Atheneum; so Brooklyn has her Bridge,” boasted a shopkeeper sign on the holiday of its opening. The bridge had been strung with lightbulbs, making it the first electrified span over water. But such innovations, again, are easily forgotten: what kept the Brooklyn Bridge alive in the minds of people was its significance in the mythos and daily life of New York City. The bridge unified two great cities as physically as a rope tied around their waists: it had been purposely designed in such a way as to connect New York's City Hall with the City Hall of Brooklyn; to extend, as it were, Broadway to Fulton Street. The success of the bridge preempted charter revision: it made the amalgamation of the five boroughs a few years later, in 1898, into one super-metropolis, a kind of inevitability, an afterthought.

“I hereby prophecy that in 1900 a.d. Brooklyn will be the city and New York will be the suburb,” wrote George Templeton Strong in his diary in 1865. “It is inevitable if both go on growing as they have grown for the last forty years. Brooklyn has room to spread and New York has not.” Brooklyn was the coming place; no one anticipated Manhattan would grow vertically. It was Brooklyn, then the fifth-largest city in the nation, that had agitated most for the bridge, thinking correctly that it would drive up the value of its Heights real estate and attract middle-class businessmen, by making their commute easier than the unreliable, icebound ferries. It was Brooklyn that had supplied the vast majority of planning and political energies for the building of the bridge, and paid the lion's share of its construction costs. So it was only fair that what had been originally called “the East River Bridge” would undergo a name change to honor its sponsoring agent. The irony is that the bridge both put Brooklyn on the map and diminished it forever, by undermining its urban independence. However much the residents of Kings County might cling to their faith that Brooklyn was still the emerging urban hub, its destiny was to be a provincial, if eccentric, bedroom borough to Manhattan.

For Manhattanites, the bridge became, as David McCullough put it, “a highway into the open air.” One of Roebling's great design decisions had been to been to build an elevated promenade, which would arch ever so slightly, so as to bow
above
the traffic. The walker would have the freedom of the city: to look down at vehicles crossing the bridge (first horse-carriages and elevated trains; later cars), or else to ignore them and gaze uninterruptedly in every direction, at the water, the boats (innumerable, during the East River's heyday as a port), the skyline, and the sky itself.

From where else can one see the whole city today? From skyscraper observatories, certainly, such as the Empire State Building, but one has to pay a fee, and then, once aloft, the pacing possibilities have distinct limits; whereas the Brooklyn Bridge promenade is an extension of the street system, a great free thoroughfare.

Governor Al Smith, in his autobiography,
Up to Now,
recalled: “In those early days the bridge served as more than a utility for transportation between the two cities. It soon became a place of recreation and of pleasure. So much so that it was referred to in songs and popularized on the variety stage. I can still sing ‘Danny by my side.’

The Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday is known as lover's lane,
I stroll there with my sweetheart, oh, time and time again;
Oh, how I love to ramble, oh, yes, it is my pride,
Dressed in my best, each day of rest, with Danny by my side.”

The lordly position of the pedestrian on the promenade must have suited Washington Roebling, who refused to enter a motorcar in his lifetime (he died in 1920). On the other hand, there is irony in the fact that this superb public space was built by a man who, after his bout with caisson sickness, hated to be in crowds, and found it a torment to socialize with anyone but his wife for more than a few minutes.

The bridge was also inspiration to poets and loners. Lewis Mumford, in his autobiography,
Sketches from Life,
told how the Brooklyn Bridge figured in a key experience of his dawning manhood. On a March day, the then-youthful Mumford was walking into Manhattan at twilight, and “as I reached the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sunlight spread across the sky, forming a halo around the jagged mountain of skyscrapers, with the darkened loft buildings and warehouses huddling below in the foreground. The towers, topped by the golden pinnacles of the new Woolworth Building, still caught the light even as it began to ebb away. Three-quarters of the way across the bridge I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights until, before I reached the Manhattan end, these buildings piled up in a dazzling mass against the indigo sky.

“Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy and light…. And there was I, breasting the March wind, drinking in the city and the sky, both vast, yet contained in me, transmitting through me the great mysterious will that made them and the promise of the new day that was still to come.” Mumford, looking backward half a century, remembers being filled with an exaltation he compares to “the wonder of an orgasm in the body of one's beloved.” He says: “In that sudden revelation of power and beauty all the confusions of adolescence dropped from me, and I trod the narrow, resilient boards of the footway with a new confidence that came, not from my isolated self alone but from the collective energies I had confronted and risen to.”

Here the Brooklyn Bridge is a cradle for self-creation. Like Rastignac
in Balzac's
Père Goriot,
waving his fist at Paris below and swearing he will conquer it someday, Mumford vows to extract the fullest from his talents, and to affect the city stretched tantalizingly around him. The bridge's elevated, 360-degree vantage point inspired feelings of wholeness bordering on omnipotence.

The Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, in his poem “Brooklyn Bridge,” compared the structure to a dinosaur, one of those “huge giant lizards” from which future geologists could re-create our world, and whose bones alone would survive the apocalyptic twentieth century. Henry James, returning to his native city after years abroad, recorded with something like horror, in his travel book
The American Scene,
his reaction to the span as an enormous steam engine and power loom, as well as a sort of Frankenstein monster: “One has the sense that the monster grows and grows, flinging abroad its loose limbs even as some unmannered young giant at his ‘larks,’ and that the binding stitches must forever fly further and faster and draw harder; the future complexity of the web, all under sky and above the sea, becoming thus that of some colossal set of clockworks, some steel-souled machine-room of brandished arms and hammering fists and opening and closing jaws.”

For James, writing in 1907, the Brooklyn Bridge was still too new—too suggestive of the ominous threat of industrialized conformity—to be cherished as a work of local genius. But Hart Crane saw and understood the lonely grandeur and achievement of the bridge from a more sympathetic, historically removed perspective. He had researched the Roeblings with an eye toward writing their biography. To inhabit their inner world, he rented the same apartment on Hicks Street, in Brooklyn Heights, from which Washington Roebling had overseen the bridge's construction. “Brooklyn Bridge,” wrote Crane to his family, is “the most superb piece of construction in the modern world, I'm sure, with strings of lights crossing it like glowing worms as the Ls and surface cars pass each other coming and going.” He chose it as his symbol of American affirmation in
The Bridge
(1927-30), his response to Eliot's
The Waste Land.
Among its many gorgeous, exhilarating lines are these in the prologue, addressed directly “To Brooklyn Bridge”:

O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)

Crane encircles the bridge with spiritual connotations: a “curveship,” like an alien spaceship dropped down from the galaxies, it redeems the prophet's pledges, sets up heavenly choirs, lifts night in its arms, condenses eternity, and, to top it all, lends its own myth to a God who seems in need of one, in our secular age.

It is interesting that so many of the most memorable paeans to the Brooklyn Bridge, in poetry (Crane, Mayakovsky, García Lorca), prose ( John Dos Passos, Thomas Wolfe, Henry Miller), and paint ( Joseph Stella, John Marin, Albert Gleizes, Marsden Hartley), were fashioned just after the First World War through the twenties and thirties, when the structure had already been standing for a number of decades. It no longer was a technological novelty, but its glamour had, if anything, skyrocketed. Why this should be may have as much to do with the development of modernism—and American modernism in particular—as with any singularities of the Brooklyn Bridge.