The Great Bridge (70 page)
The house was decorated as if for a wedding. Both mantels in the drawing room were banked with red and white roses, wisteria, white lilacs, and in the center were clusters of calla lilies. On either side of the folding doors was a huge shield of roses. There were more roses and lilacs in gilt baskets and vases of cut flowers distributed through every room. And the balustrade on the stairway was trimmed with smilax all the way to the top floor.
There were busts of both the Chief Engineer and his father standing on one drawing-room mantel. On the elder Roebling’s white marble head Emily had placed a wreath of immortelles, while the one of her husband wore a laurel wreath decorated with tiny American flags and a white satin ribbon on which she had had printed in red and blue: “Chief Engineer Washington A. Roebling, May 24, 1883. Brooklyn Bridge. Let him who has won it bear the palm.”
A band was playing on a balcony above the drawing room, on the river side of the house, and through the doors beneath the balcony, out in the garden overlooking the river, stood a grand marquee and long tables of food and refreshments.
Emily and Washington Roebling stood side by side, just inside the parlor door, as the President and Seth Low entered the room together. “The engineer was pale, but he showed no excitement,” one observer noted. She was dressed in heavy black silk, trimmed in crepe, with a knot of violets in her belt. She was described by the papers as beautiful and vivacious.
It was said the President warmly congratulated the engineer as they shook hands. After that people kept pressing through the door in great numbers. In all there were more than a thousand guests, including Grover Cleveland, the two mayors, all the speakers of the day (Abram Hewitt did make an appearance, after all), Mr. and Mrs. William C. Kingsley, General and Mrs. Henry Slocum, Stranahan and his wife, all the other trustees and wives, the assistant engineers, Ferdinand and Charles Roebling and their wives, Elvira Stewart, Professor and Mrs. Methfessel, Moses Beach from next door, Simeon Chittenden, Henry Pierrepont, A. S. Barnes, William Sellers of the Edge Moor Iron Company, Ludwig Semler, former Mayor Grace, Judge McCue, Hamilton Fish, William Evarts, Congressman Flower, and the Reverend and Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher.
Roebling remained standing only ten minutes or so, then went back to the sofa, where he sat, not saying much, Emily beside him. The President meanwhile gave all the appearance of having a splendid time. He tapped his foot to the band music, admired the flowers, went out into the garden, shook a great many hands, and stayed perhaps an hour in all. Once he was gone, Roebling excused himself and there was a burst of applause as he went slowly back up the stairs. The reception lasted another hour or more after that, but for Roebling his first and last ceremonial duty as Chief Engineer was over.
Everyone on both sides of the river was waiting for dark. Those whose job it was to describe the scene in words went to great lengths to do it justice. One reporter who was out on the bridge wrote that the innumerable boats and ships on the river looked like a sleeping city. Another man who was also on the bridge wrote this:
As the sun went down the scene from the bridge was beautiful. It had been a perfect day. Up and down on either side of New York the bright blue water lay gently rippling, while to the south it merged into the great bay and disappeared toward the sea. The vast cities spread away on both sides. Beyond rolled the hilly country until it was lost in the mists of the sky. All up and down the harbor the shipping, piers, and buildings were still gaily decorated. On the housetops of both Brooklyn and New York were multitudes of people…
The great buildings in New York loomed up black as ink against the brilliant background of the sky. The New York bridge pier looked somber and gloomy as night. But in Brooklyn the blaze of the dying sun bathed everything gold. The great building looked like burnished brass…the west the sun sent its last tribute to the bridge in a series of great bars of golden light that shot up fanlike into the blue sky. Gradually the gold melted away, leaving the heavens cloudless. The sky was a light blue in the west, but grew darker as it rose, until it sank behind Brooklyn in a deep-sea blue.
Slowly the extremities of the twin cities began to grow indistinct…. The towers of Brooklyn lost their golden hue. They seemed to sink slowly into the city itself. In New York the outlines of the huge buildings became wavering and indistinct.
Then one by one the series of electric lights on the bridge leaped up until the chain was made from Brooklyn to New York. Dot by dot flashes of electric lights sprang up in the upper part of New York. The two great burners at Madison and Union Squares flared up, and the dome of the Post Office in New York set a circlet of diamonds out against the relief of the sky. The streets of the two cities sparkled into life like the jets on a limitless theatrical chandelier, and the windows of the houses popped into notice hundreds at a time. Long strings of lanterns were run over the rigging of the shipping in the harbor, and red and green port and starboard lights seemed numberless. The steamers sped to and fro on the water, leaving long ripples of white foam, which glistened in the light like silver.
In Brooklyn every public building was ablaze with gaslight. The Music Academy had a gas-jet rendition of the bridge out front. Houses draped with Chinese lanterns looked like Christmas trees. There were strings of lanterns over Montague Street and a block over, on Pierrepont, the Historical Society windows were lighted with hundreds of candles. Columbia Heights was nearly as bright as day with gaslights, lanterns, candles. Simeon Chittenden had a big sign in front of his house done in gas jets—“Welcome to Brooklyn’s Guests”—but as the President was driven past later in the evening, a gust of wind blew out half the letters.
Every street on the Heights looked like a carnival. Indeed the crowds in both cities were far greater now than at any time earlier in the day. No traffic was moving anywhere near the river. Uptown New York and the inland sections of Brooklyn were all but deserted. Where there had been a hundred people watching by the river during the day, now there were a thousand, or at least so it seemed. The
Times
estimated there were 150,000 people just in the neighborhood of City Hall.
Suddenly a solitary rocket shot into the sky over Columbia Heights and burst into a spray of blue stars. It had come from the mayor’s house, where the dinner for the President had been going on.
Almost instantly the lights on the bridge went out. For a moment not a thing could be seen of it. Then there was a long, distant hissing sound, a sudden roar, and fifty rockets exploded simultaneously high over the main span of the bridge, while at least twenty bombs burst higher still, from above the towers, and poured down great showers of gold and silver. “From an elevated point the city seemed to be in volcanic action, with the spouting crater on the suspension bridge.”
At its final meeting on May 14, as its last official act, the Executive Committee of the Bridge Company had contracted with the New York firm of Detwiller & Street, Pyrotechnists, to put on a display of fireworks “worthy of the place and the occasion.” In all, fourteen tons of fireworks—more than ten thousand pieces—were set off from the bridge.
It lasted a solid hour. There was not a moment’s letup. One meteoric burst followed another. Rockets went off hundreds at a time and were seen from as far away as Montclair, New Jersey. Bombs exploded incessantly above the towers, bathing the bridge in red. In the strange light, firemen on the bridge could be seen in strong silhouette and the water from their hoses looked like molten silver. Meantime, innumerable gas balloons were being sent aloft. They were fifty feet in circumference and loaded with fireworks and as they swung into the sky, one by one, they scattered balls of colored fire over the river.
At each burst of a rocket a huge roar went up from the shores. Hundreds of thousands of people were watching—probably the biggest crowd ever gathered in New York until that time—and nobody, in all his days, had ever seen anything like this.
Nearly every boat on the water was making some sort of noise or display. Rockets and fireworks were shooting up from the middle of the river and down the bay. On one big excursion steamer, ablaze with lights, a calliope was shrieking out “America.” Bands were playing on board other boats.
Rockets were going up all over New York meantime—and in Brooklyn. From the middle of the bridge now came great thunderclap reports as zinc balls, fired from mortars, burst five hundred feet up, fairly illuminating the two cities, like sustained lightning.
And finally, at nine, as the display on the bridge ended with one incredible barrage—five hundred rockets fired all at once—every whistle and horn on the river joined in. The rockets “broke into millions of stars and a shower of golden rain which descended upon the bridge and the river.” Bells were rung, gongs were beaten, men and women yelled themselves hoarse, musicians blew themselves red in the face. And then when it was all over and nearly quiet again and the boats on the river were beginning to untangle themselves, there was one last memorable touch that not even Detwiller & Street, Pyrotechnists, could have arranged. “Hardly had the last falling spark died out,” wrote an editor who had been watching from the top of the Tribune Building, “when the moon rose slowly over the further tower and sent a broad beam like a benediction across the river.”
The grand reception for the President at the Music Academy, which began almost immediately after the fireworks, was considered a great success. The President, Grover Cleveland, William Kingsley, General Slocum, and twenty or thirty others stood on the stage, surrounded by a small forest of potted palms, while the people of Brooklyn were permitted to pass by and pay their respects. The procession lasted until ten. Arthur was in fine humor still, bowing, smiling, playing his part exactly as everybody would have wanted him to. And one member of his Cabinet was heard to remark, “Why I thought that Brooklyn had one hotel and a shipyard or two, but it’s quite a town.”
It had been announced in advance that the bridge would be thrown open to the public at the stroke of midnight and that anyone might cross upon payment of one cent. Enormous crowds had gathered at both ends.
At eleven twenty two young men with blond mustaches raised the windows of the Brooklyn toll booths and H. R. Van Keuren—a good Brooklyn name, reporters decided—was the first to put his money in the box. The first lady to cross was a Mrs. C. G. Peck of Baltic Street. The first vehicle from the Brooklyn side was an old-fashioned top-wagon drawn by a bony white horse whose large white hooves came down on the bridge floor with a noise like the discharge of musketry. The driver was a Charles Overton from Coney Island, who had been waiting at the gate for two hours and who also managed to make the first trip across from the New York side, since the gates there opened ten to fifteen minutes later than those in Brooklyn.
A fierce struggle ensued at the New York gates, characteristically, and perhaps it was altogether appropriate that the first man through was the Keeper of the City Hall. Once he was beyond the gate, there was an even more violent rush from behind. Police began swinging their clubs and several people had been rather roughly treated by the time the whole crowd—perhaps three thousand people—was strung out in along orderly line.
People poured across the bridge through the entire night and were still coming with the first light in the sky. According to a count kept by the
Times,
the first beggar to cross came over from Brooklyn, as did the first drunk, the first policeman, the first hearse (which was empty), the first “dude,” the first Negro, and the first musician, a Scottish bagpiper who marched over playing “The Campbells Are Coming.”
How late the Chief Engineer and his wife stayed up watching from their window, who may have been with them during the evening, what they said to each other, or what reflections went unsaid as bombs and rockets burst over the bridge, can only be guessed at.
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.”
FOR NEARLY
fifty years after it was completed the Brooklyn Bridge reigned supreme as the most magnificent, if not technically the largest, suspension bridge on earth.
In its initial days as a public thoroughfare it was commonly referred to as “The Eighth Wonder of the World” and it was an even greater sensation than anyone had expected. On its first full day, May 25, 1883, a total of 150,300 people crossed on foot and 1,800 vehicles went over carrying an unknown number of others. The following day, a Saturday, the count was down. But on Sunday, May 27, a spectacular spring day, 163,500 people went “strolling” on the Great Bridge. One veteran New York policeman said he had never in all his experience seen such crowds. “It seems to me as if the people have got the bridge craze,” he said.
And then, tragically, on Thursday, May 31, a week to the day after the bridge was opened, the very thing Roebling had warned against happened.
It was Memorial Day, a holiday in both cities, and the weather was ideal. There had been thousands on the bridge all morning. But C. C. Martin had allowed pedestrian traffic on both carriageways and that had taken pressure off the promenade until some time near three thirty when the crowds began to build rapidly. Probably twenty thousand people were on the bridge by four, or the approximate time of the panic. When it was all over, twelve people had been trampled to death.
The trouble began at the top of a narrow flight of stairs leading to the promenade at the end of the New York approach. A crowd pressing up the stairs was running head on into another crowd coming in the opposite direction, from the New York tower. There were fifteen steps in all, broken into two flights by a landing just seven feet wide. When the two oncoming throngs met there, it was virtually impossible for anyone to move either way and people approaching from behind, in both directions, kept trying to shove their way forward.
But from what several eyewitnesses said later, it seems some sort of order might have been restored had not a woman coming down the stairway lost her footing. Another woman began to scream at the top of her lungs and there was an immediate rush to see what was happening. Those who were packed onto the stairway tried desperately to hold back the crowd but it was impossible. In an instant three or four more lost their balance and fell. Meanwhile, the crowds farther back on the promenade kept advancing, nobody knowing what was going on up ahead, and in a moment the whole stairway was packed with dead and dying men, women, and children. People were shrieking and screaming and those who suddenly found themselves at the brink of the stairway and saw what was happening turned to shout for those behind to move back, but then they too lost their step and went over on top of the trampled bodies below. The most terrifying crush was on the promenade just back from the top of the stairs. Numerous people had their clothes torn off. In places, it was reported, people were jammed so tight that blood oozed from their noses and ears.
Hats, umbrellas, gloves, shoes, loose change, fell between the bridge train tracks and rained down on the housetops and streets below. Among a group of boys playing in the streets was Al Smith. “That was my first view of a great calamity,” he said later. “I did not sleep for nights.”
Other explanations would be given later. It would be said that somebody out in the middle of the bridge began to scream that it was falling. It would be said a gang of “roughs” from New York had started pushing and shoving people. Probably there is some truth to both accounts.
Lawsuits as a result of the accident added up to half a million dollars, but no negligence was proved. A coroner’s jury reprimanded the Bridge Company for the narrowness of the stairway and for employing too few police. The Bridge Company blamed the newspapers for having created an “undefined feeling of insecurity” about the bridge, but promptly doubled the number of police on the promenade.
C. C. Martin remained in charge. He was officially named Chief Engineer on July 9, 1883, after Roebling had submitted his formal resignation, and he would hold that job until 1902, devoting, in all, thirty-three years of his life to the bridge.
Martin’s full force for operating and maintaining the bridge was comparable in size to that needed for a large ship or fair-sized factory of the day. He had one assistant engineer, a chief mechanical engineer, who had charge of the steam engines and rope traction, three assistant mechanical engineers, three oilers, and three firemen. There were six locomotive engineers, six locomotive firemen, one master of transportation, forty-five conductors, a superintendent of tolls, nineteen collectors, one trainmaster, four train dispatchers, four yardmen, and five switchmen. A master machinist had charge of the machine shop and locomotives. There were two blacksmiths, a foreman of carpenters with “a force of men changing with the exigencies of the work,” a foreman of car repairs and inspector of grips, a foreman of labor and general work, one captain of police, one sergeant, three roundsmen, and eighty-six policemen. Counting Martin, the grand total came to 201 full-time employees.
The bridge trains began running in September and worked to perfection. By the time it was a year old 37,000 people a day were using the bridge, or very nearly as many people as fourteen ferries were handling the year it was begun. In their first full year of service the bridge trains carried 9,234,690 passengers, but then the completion of the Brooklyn Elevated to Fulton Ferry more than doubled the patronage. In 1885 the bridge trains handled nearly twenty million passengers. The trains ran twenty-four hours a day and by 1888, just five years after the bridge was built, they were handling more than thirty million passengers a year. The terminals were expanded, more cars were put into service. 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.
In May of 1884, P. T. Barnum, “in the interest of the dear public,” took a herd of twenty-one elephants, including the famous “Jumbo,” over the bridge to Brooklyn and thereupon declared that he, too, was now perfectly satisfied as to the solidity of the masterpiece.
And inevitably, perhaps, there were certain individuals who would see the bridge as a challenge to their manhood or as a means of doing away with themselves. The bridge was scarcely in full operating order before they began leaping from it, for glory or oblivion, and frequently with the unintended result.
The first to try for glory was Robert E. Odium, a brawny swimming instructor from Washington, D.C. On May 19, 1885, to divert the bridge police who were waiting to stop him, Odium sent a friend onto the bridge to go through the motions of jumping. Then he came riding up in a closed carriage, stepped out, climbed onto the railing, and, dressed in trunks and a bright-red swimming shirt, jumped to his death, with one arm thrust straight over his head, the other clamped firmly to his side.
Steve Brodie, the only man ever to become famous for jumping from the bridge, probably never did. He was a personable, unemployed Irishman in his early twenties, who, not long after Odlum’s much publicized failure, began boasting that he would be the next to jump. Bets were made along the Bowery, but just when Brodie intended to jump remained a mystery. Then on July 23, 1886, it was announced he had done it and lived to tell the tale. Several friends said they had been witnesses, that they had watched him plummet straight into the river, where he was picked up by a passing barge. But nobody else had seen his jump and it was commonly said among the skeptics, of whom there were a great many, that a dummy had been dropped from the bridge and that Brodie merely swam out from shore in time to surface beside the passing barge.
Brodie was put in jail briefly for his supposed feat, then opened a saloon that became a favorite Bowery stop for sight-seers and slumming parties. In the main barroom hung a large oil painting of the bridge and there for all to see was Brodie plunging toward the water. For further historical documentation, there was a framed affidavit from the barge captain who claimed to have rescued the hero.
But Steve Brodie’s jump from the Brooklyn Bridge would be fixed forever in the public imagination by a play called
On the Bowery, which
opened in 1894. Brodie was the star and his big scene was a leap from the bridge, done with all sorts of elaborate special effects, only this time it was to save the girl, who had been thrown off by the villain. The play was a smash hit and eventually toured the country. A bridge sweeper sang a moral ballad, Brodie sang “My Pearl’s a Bowery Girl!” (“My Poil’s a Bowery Goil!”) and, for encores, a song called “The Bowery,” written for an earlier production, which became a standard part of every performance.
Brodie became rich and famous, but died of diabetes at age thirty-six or thereabouts, in 1901. For years after his celebrated jump people kept asking him why he did not do it again, only this time with reliable witnesses. His answer was always the same: “I done it oncet.”
Others kept on trying. Larry Donovan, a pressman at the
Police Gazette,
was the first to jump successfully. He went over the side wearing a red shirt like Odlum and a pair of baseball shoes. In 1887 James Martin, a painter’s assistant on the bridge, fell off and lived and the following year a young man named Byrnes jumped to impress his girl friend and he too lived. In 1892 Francis McCarey jumped and was killed, but it seems that was what he wanted, so probably he ought to be considered the first suicide.
Then there was a man who jumped wearing a derby hat and was still wearing it when he surfaced in the river quite unharmed and another man who went off wearing immense canvas wings. He sailed a thousand feet upstream before landing safely on the water. But by the turn of the century the jumping craze had ended.
The bridge remained a subject of endless fascination for almost everybody who saw it. For the millions of immigrants arriving in New York through the 1880’s and 1890’s and on into the new century, it was one of the first things to be seen of the New World as they came up the bay. It was one of the landmarks they all looked for, the great world-famous symbol of the faith that was literally moving mountains. And the fact that it had been designed by an immigrant and built largely by immigrant workers did much naturally to enhance its appeal.
In truth there is really no end to the number of things the bridge meant to people. For whole generations growing up in New York and Brooklyn it was simply a large, dominant, and generally beloved part of the natural order of things. The river without the bridge or Brooklyn without the bridge would have been unthinkable and year after year people went to it on especially fine days, or at moments of personal stress or joy, the way people go to a mountain or walk beside the sea.
For countless people their first walk on the bridge would remain one of childhood’s earliest memories. Countless others would tell how it was the place where they fell in love. No doubt it very often was. Al Smith was among those who loved to sing “Danny by My Side,” the opening line of which runs “The Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday is known as lovers’ lane.”
In
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,
the most popular of the many novels to be written with a Brooklyn setting, a young World War I soldier from Pennsylvania says, “I thought if ever I got to New York, I’d like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.” It was something felt by whole generations of Americans before and since. 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. They would ride bicycles across, take honeymoon strolls by moonlight, carry newborn babies proudly down the promenade, or scatter the ashes of the dearly departed from the middle of the main span.
It was a place to go on stifling summer evenings, to take some exercise to and from work, to walk the baby, to watch the gulls, to find relief from the city. Its promenade was and would remain one of the most exhilarating walks on the continent. 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.
Just why this bridge, more than all others, has had such a hold on people is very hard to pin down. But in the years since it opened it has been the subject of more paintings, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and photographs than any man-made structure in America. There are probably a thousand paintings and lithographs of the bridge by well-known artists alone.
*
It has been the setting for scenes in films, for Maxwell Anderson’s
Winterset,
and for all kinds of advertising. (It would seem that a whole chronological display of female fashions in America, since the advent of photography, could be assembled just from pictures posed on the bridge year after year.) It has been used repeatedly on postcards, Christmas cards, book jackets, posters, record jackets. It has been the symbol for a New York television network and for a popular Italian chewing gum.
There have been songs about the bridge, besides the one Al Smith liked, and a great many poems, nearly all of which have been less than memorable. The one notable exception is
The Bridge
by Hart Crane, who, in the 1920’s, to identify as closely as possible with his subject, moved into Washington Roebling’s old house at 110 Columbia Heights. In Crane’s powerful but not altogether coherent masterpiece, the bridge is seen as a shining symbol of affirmation at the end of an epic search through the American past. It is the “Tall Vision-of-the Voyage,” spare, “silver-paced,” and all-redeeming.
