Original subtitles

Harper's Weekly, 1883.

It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument and

to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity is a work of bare utility.

Not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.

It's the spirit behind the Brooklyn Bridge and

the spirit which is in the structure itself.

The spirit that you anticipate and appreciate even if you've never studied

engineering, even if you've never studied aesthetics, it's there.

It's there and one in one degree or another, people

who use it and have their eyes open respond to it.

When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, there was an interview published in the

New York, one of the New York papers with a woman on Long Island and they asked her

what her response to all this excitement was and she said it was very interesting

but it was nothing compared to the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.

She had been there.

It was the biggest bridge in the world.

Everyone in Brooklyn and New York agreed.

It had absolutely no rivals.

The bridge was the vision of John A.

Roebling, an immigrant, a genius, a civil engineer.

It was finally completed under the most difficult

circumstances imaginable by his son, Washington Roebling.

The bridge was half again as big as any built before it.

Its two stone towers were taller than any structure on either shore.

Taller than anything else on the entire North American continent.

The roadway of the bridge was as spacious as Fifth Avenue.

And down the center of the roadway, above the traffic, was an elevated

promenade where people could go to enjoy the views

of the bay and of the cities as never before.

And the distinctive network of cables that suspended the bridge was made of steel.

The new metal of a new age.

It took 14 long years to build the bridge from 1869 to 1883.

Years during which Edison invented the light bulb and the phonograph.

Alexander Graham Bell, the telephone.

The buffalo were exterminated on the Great Plains.

The curveball and catcher's mask were introduced into baseball.

President Chester A.

Arthur installed plumbing in the White House.

In Europe, Marx died.

And Einstein, Lenin and Picasso were born.

He is an extraordinary man and if you people in Brooklyn are wise, you will

interfere with his views as little as possible.

Give the old man his way and trust him.

How and where John Roebling found time to do all he did?

To attend conventions and write voluminously for scientific journals?

Practice the flute and the piano?

Study metaphysics?

Pour forth his lucubrations on thousands of pages of manuscript?

Invent tools and machinery?

Design canals and bridges and himself superintend their construction?

How he achieved all this?

I say, bewilders imagination.

The contemplated work, when constructed in accordance with my designs, will not only

be the greatest bridge in existence, it will be the

greatest engineering feat of the continent and of the age.

As a great work of art and a successful specimen of advanced bridge engineering,

this structure will forever testify to the energy, enterprise,

and wealth of that community which shall secure its erection.

Respectfully submitted, John A.

Roebling September 1, 1867.

Roebling had grown up in the walled village of Mulhausen, Germany.

The first member of his family ever to leave the village, he attended the Royal

Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, where he studied engineering and

philosophy, and was reputedly the favorite

student of the great George Frederick Hegel.

According to family tradition, it was Hegel who inspired the young man to

go to the new world, to resolve his destiny in all that space.

In the western reaches of Pennsylvania, he founded the village of Saxenburg,

a utopian agrarian community.

It was there six years later that his first son, Washington, was born.

To me as a child, Saxenburg was the finest place in the world.

But my father began to realize he had not been cut out by nature for a farmer.

He lacked patience.

So he took to engineering again, his true vocation, and let my mother do

the farming, which she did very well when he would let her.

From the start, John Roebling was fascinated by the suspension bridge form.

With the towers in compression, and the cables in tension, he saw the

suspension bridge as the perfect equilibrium of nature.

In some foreign scientific journals, Roebling had read that by twisting a

number of iron wires together, one could produce

an iron rope of great strength and flexibility.

Having himself seen two men die on a portage canal by the failure of ordinary

hemp rope, Roebling understood the importance of the invention.

In a small shed behind his house, he started the first wire rope factory in America.

Ultimately, it made him rich.

And it freed him from the drudgery of the farm.

You drive over to suspension bridge, and divide your misery between the chances

of smashing down 200 feet into the river below, and the chances

of having a railway train overhead smashing down on you.

Either possibility is discomforting taken by itself, but mixed

together they amount in the aggregate to positive unhappiness.

Mark Twain.

The most striking features of this iron web were the cables radiating from its towers.

In an age when one out of every four bridges built was collapsing, these

diagonal stays gave a Roebling bridge its strength and beauty.

John Roebling's next bridge was over the Allegheny River at Pittsburgh.

There he was joined by his son Washington, who had completed a degree in engineering

at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and was

to become his father's favorite assistant.

Washington went on to receive his practical

training as a bridge builder during the Civil War.

In urgent need of bridges, the Union Army was impressed

with his ability and tolerance of his inexperience.

Three bridges and eight battles later, including

Gettysburg, they promoted him to the rank of colonel.

When peace came, Washington Roebling moved directly to Cincinnati, Ohio, where his

father was building the biggest suspension bridge in the world.

The size and magnitude of this work far

surpasses any expectations I had formed of it.

It is the highest thing in this country.

It will take me a week to get used to the proportions of everything around here.

Increasingly, it was Washington Roebling who assumed responsibility for the day-to

-day construction of the bridge, freeing John Roebling to pursue his next great plan.

January 1867, Brooklyn Eagle.

In consequence of the extreme cold weather which we have lately experienced,

New York Harbor has been completely frozen over, so persons

and even teams have crossed from the city to Brooklyn.

The newspapers have been filled for weeks with vehement demand for the bridge,

which all agree must be built at once, from New York to Brooklyn.

For John Roebling also, the Brooklyn Bridge

had become the overriding passion of his life.

In just three months, he produced all the drawings, the cross-sections and location

plans, made preliminary surveys, took soundings, estimated cost,

and wrote his proposal.

In plan, everything was done with exacting precision until the proposed structure

conformed with both his mathematical and spiritual ideal of perfection.

That April, legislation was passed in Albany, creating the New York and Brooklyn

Bridge Company, and its trustees appointed John Roebling chief engineer.

The common council appropriated one and a half million dollars to start the work.

And in early June of 1869, construction finally began.

Brooklyn Eagle.

An accident occurred on the 28th of June while Mr. Roebling

with his son was engaged in surveying for the bridge.

He was standing on a string piece inside the Fulton ferry rack.

On seeing a boat approach, Mr. Roebling stepped back onto a beam, but a knotty

protuberance caught one of his feet and the pressure of the oncoming boat crushed it.

My father was a hydropathist and had decided ideas of his own.

He refused to listen to the surgeon I brought, dismissed him, and proceeded to

cure himself with water, until he died 17 days

later in the most horrible agonies of Lockjaw.

John Roebling had proclaimed that his bridge would be the greatest in existence.

All his son had to do now was build it.

Here I was, 32 years old, suddenly in charge of the most stupendous engineering

structure of the age, with only preparatory plans, nothing fixed or decided.

The prop on which I hitherto leaned had fallen.

Henceforth I must rely on myself.

Washington Roebling.

April 9th, 1870.

For those not acquainted with the process, we may say that a caisson is an inverted

wooden box on which the towers are constructed.

As it rests on the riverbed, a hollow space called air chamber is formed beneath it.

Compressed air is forced into the chamber until the water is entirely displaced.

The chamber is entered by laborers who undermine the

edges of the caisson while masonry is built on top of it.

Causing in this way a steady and gradual descent

through the riverbed until it's grounded on bedrock.

In theory it worked.

Small caissons holding one or two men had been used in Europe.

But the nature of the difficulties in sinking a caisson

half the size of a city block could hardly be foreseen.

Uncertain that caissons of such extraordinary size could even be built,

the shipbuilders who were to construct them refused to guarantee their safe

delivery and demanded all the money in advance.

The first caisson would be built for the Brooklyn side of the river.

Seventy thousand tons of stone and brickwork are to be piled upon the caisson

which now floats lightly on the surface of the East River.

All the weight of every man, woman and child in this city would be but a fraction

of the weight of building materials this wooden caisson will have to bear.

Few people in New York at that time realized how complex the caissons actually were.

That Washington Roebling designed every feature.

He devised an airlock for admitting the workmen and an ingenious method of

removing the earth and rock without allowing the compressed air inside to escape.

A shaft was passed through the roof of the caisson.

It was filled with a column of water.

The water held precariously in place by the force of the air inside.

Through it a giant clamshell dredge could move freely as it

carried the debris up and out of the caisson to waiting barges.

Each decision was described in a drawing, hand painted with meticulous care,

often by Roebling himself, for the benefit of

those craftsmen who couldn't read or speak English.

On paper it all worked perfectly.

June, 1870.

The bed is so rocky that in place of one month five are required to do the work.

And these are five months of incessant worry and toil, everlasting breaking down

and repairing and constant study where to improve if possible.

For Roebling and the men working inside the caisson with all that weight bearing

down overhead and the river outside it was a terrifying and eerie experience.

The force of the compressed air made pulses race, made voices thin and

unnatural, and made the danger of fire very serious.

Flaming calcium lamps lit one chamber while the rest

of the caisson lay dark and slimy with river mud.

Often explosions of compressed air escaping under the edges plunged the men

into total darkness as several feet of water rushed in.

It was said that Washington Roebling was the only one who kept his head.

June 15, 1870.

Rate of descent not half a foot this week.

The caisson of the caisson of the caisson of the caisson of the caisson of the east

river bridge was severely damaged by fire yesterday.

I don't believe any man now living will cross that bridge.

I am the chief engineer and I am in constant

attendance day and night except time for sleep.

A fire broke out Thursday evening and I stayed down until about 5 o'clock.

I felt I should be paralyzed if I stayed down another minute.

I was partially paralyzed and I'm not quite over it now.

The damage caused by the fire was repaired at huge cost and effort.

The Brooklyn caisson was completed on March 11, 1871 and filled with concrete.

Its final position was 44 feet 6 inches below water level.

The second caisson, now under construction for the New

York side, would have to sink almost 60 feet deeper.

It was being lined with boilerplate to prevent fire.

But the increased air pressure required inside would cause even graver problems.

The journal of Dr. Andrew H.

Smith, surgeon to the bridge company.

The pathological effects of high atmospheric

pressure I propose to call the caisson disease.

From the 25th of January when I assumed medical charge of the men, 110 cases of

sickness occurred, which were fairly due to compressed air.

Hugh Rourke, March 12, had suffered previously from severe pains in the chest

and limbs which compelled him to give up work.

Sometime afterward, when the pressure was 4 atmospheres, he resumed work for a

single day, the labor being excessively severe.

He suffered no inconvenience apparently, however, and after

leaving the caisson, washed his hands and face as usual.

A moment after he fell senseless, and in 15 minutes he was dead.

As the caisson descended deeper into the river

bed, the threat of the disease increased.

When the test borings on the New York Tower site revealed that the caisson would

have to descend to the appalling depth of 106 feet

below water level, all other engineers shrank back.

And I had to face this enormous and dangerous task, spending almost two years

in compressed air and nearly losing my life.

Colonel Roebling was brought up out of the New York caisson, nearly insensible.

All that night, his death was hourly expected.

They were suffering from what is now called the Benz, caisson disease,

an excruciatingly painful affliction caused by nitrogen bubbles in the bloodstream.

By December, Colonel Roebling found himself too

weak and ill to go down to the bridge anymore.

At first I thought I would succumb, but I had a tower to lean upon,

my wife, a woman of infinite tact and wisest counsel.

Washington had met his bride eight years earlier during the Civil War.

We've just had the most successful ball ever given by any army or by anyone.

Miss Emily Warren, sister of the General, came specially from West Point to attend.

It was the first time I ever saw her, and I am very much

of the opinion that she has captured my heart, at last.

He is unpretentious in manner, and one might scan him for hours and see

no traits, except his continuous quiet and strong self-composure.

He is a good classical scholar, a fine linguist, and as a mineralogist,

he is nearly as widely known as he is as an engineer.

Now confined to his bed, Washington continued the work with Emily's help.

She began by taking dictation.

As time went on, as she grew fluent in engineering, she became his most valued

emissary, his eyes, his ears, his good right

arm, a diplomat, and a soother of damaged egos.

She was also the one person whose company he could tolerate.

From Fossil brought up out of the river bed, Roebling determined that the strata

upon which the caisson now rested had not shifted in several million years.

Faced with the inevitability of another year's digging, and the loss of perhaps a

hundred lives, he weighed the incalculable risk of a weak foundation.

In staking his reputation on his own judgment, he halted

the caisson's descent almost thirty feet short of bedrock.

The decision, entirely Roebling's, was the

most daring and difficult of the whole project.

And to this day, the New York Tower does not stand on bedrock, but on sand.

Towers, 1870 to 1876.

While the newspapers and the public were transfixed by the drama inside the

caissons, the two stone towers grew ever taller and more conspicuous.

If the caissons were the test of Roebling's courage and intelligence as an

engineer, the towers were the tangible proof that the bridge was going up.

Brooklyn Eagle, September 28th, 1872.

Everything possible is done by steam.

The stone is stored at Red Hook, and a scowl brings it to the structure every day.

The stones are lifted from the scowl by steam, and placed on two cars on a track.

Steam derricks raise them from the cars and place them in their proper position.

The spaces are filled up with concrete.

Even this is mixed by machinery.

A communication from the stonecutters, asking for an increase of five cents an

hour to their wage, was referred to a committee.

The pay of the laborers is as follows.

30 cents an hour.

Day laborers, 12.5 cents an hour.

15 cents an hour.

June 25th, 1876.

General George Armstrong Custer killed at the

Little Big Horn by force of 4,000 Indians.

Additional details are anxiously awaited throughout the nation.

Washington Roebling was not seen on the bridge site again.

He survived the caisson disease, but he never really recovered.

He remained a recluse, suffering from pain, nervousness, failing eyesight,

and terrible physical weakness.

I am an invalid, confined to the house.

And minerals are the only things which do not tire or excite me.

For the duration of the construction, Roebling lived on Brooklyn Heights,

where he could supervise the work from his bedroom window.

And it was from there that he transmitted his detailed instructions through Emily.

It could not have been accomplished but for the

unselfish devotion of his assistant engineers.

Each man had a certain department in charge.

And they worked with all their energies to have the job done

properly, according to Colonel Roebling's plans and wishes.

The average age of the engineering staff, Roebling included, was all of 31 years.

Colonel William Payne at 41 was the old man of

the staff, while George McNulty was barely 20.

February 1875.

The work that should be pressed forward with all dispatch is the New York

Anchorage, in order that it be completed by the time

the masonry of the towers is ready for cable making.

Located 900 feet inland on both shores, two massive stone anchorages would be

constructed to secure the ends of the four great suspension cables.

The cables would be fixed to chains of long iron eye bars that disappeared into

the anchorage, and were in turn tied to four cast

iron anchor plates embedded deep within the granite.

When I place a certain amount of dead weight in the shape of granite on the

anchor plates, I know it will remain there beyond all contingency.

In 1871, the notorious William Marcy Tweed was New York's school commissioner,

the assistant street commissioner, president of the board of supervisors,

a New York state senator, chairman of the democratic central committee, Grand Sachem

of Tammany Hall, and a trustee of the New York and Brooklyn Bridge Company.

A testimony of William Marcy Tweed.

Mr. Murphy, who was a brother senator, called on me and stated that he was

president of the Brooklyn Bridge, and desired to have the common council

authorize one and one half million dollars for the benefit of that bridge.

I conversed with a gentleman on the board, and he

said the appropriation could be had by paying for it.

Either 55 or 65 thousand was agreed upon.

Mr. Murphy told me to go ahead and make the negotiations.

With Boss Tweed in jail, a pall of sarcasm and

suspicion fell over every public enterprise in the city.

The Brooklyn Tower of the East River Bridge was completed on the 16th of December.

It is very imposing in appearance.

We hope it will not prove a tower of folly.

November 8, 1876.

Samuel Tilden has won the popular vote, but they say

that Governor Hayes of Ohio will be the president.

In 1876, America's 100th birthday was marked by a world's fair in Philadelphia,

a gaudy celebration of technology.

John Roebling's sons had an exhibition in a hall which

enclosed 13 acres of brand new mechanical inventions.

But the centennial also brought the infamous contested election of Rutherford B.

Hayes, a disastrous bridge collapse in Ashtabula, Ohio, and an underlying strain

of doubt and disillusionment in the face of the celebration.

It would be foolish, if not wicked, to spend any more money on a bridge that

is not called for, very seriously damages the commerce of this harbor, taxes the

financial ability of these two cities to the utmost, and cannot fail to be taken

down by the mandate of the courts, or demolished by the winds.

Cables, 1876 to 1878.

As John Roebling had intended, the four main suspension

cables would be constructed in place high above the river.

Number eight gauge wires, less than a quarter of an inch in diameter,

would be pulled strand by strand from great spools fixed on the Brooklyn anchorage.

A traveler rope would take the wire up and over the Brooklyn tower, out over the

river, up and over the other tower, and down to the far anchorage,

where it would be looped around the anchor

chain, and then returned to the Brooklyn side.

The wires were laid up parallel, like pencils bound by rubber bands.

Each finished cable would contain 6,289 such

wires, over 3,500 miles, bundled tightly together.

331 wires to a strand, 19 strands to a cable.

John Roebling's Sons Incorporated had pioneered cable manufacture in America,

and was unquestionably the best in the business.

But John Roebling's Sons did not make the cables for the Brooklyn Bridge.

Seizing an opportunity to display his integrity, Abram S.

Hewitt, a trustee who also manufactured wire, stated that he would not bid on the

cables, and further would resign if Roebling's Sons did.

As you seem to be deeply impressed with Mr. Hewitt's action, I desire to say that

his magnanimity is all a show, as the firm of Cooper and

Hewitt have no facilities whatever for making steel wire.

And if you receive a bid from a Mr. Haig of South

Brooklyn, it will be well for you to investigate a little.

The work of manufacturing the crucible steel wire

is now in active progress at the factory of Mr. J.

Lloyd Haig in South Brooklyn.

It is a matter of great satisfaction that such

a superior quality of wire is being furnished.

On Thanksgiving of 1877, a small wire snapped.

The incident seemed of little consequence, but

Colonel Payne sent a section of the wire to Roebling.

It is as brittle as glass, it is worthless, and

the most dangerous material that could be employed.

Is this due to a wrong system of inspection, or what is the reason in your opinion?

Washington Roebling.

As Roebling had forewarned, Haig had been submitting and resubmitting the same good

wire for inspection, while sending hundreds of rejected spools down to the bridge site.

The distressing point in this affair is that all the rejected

wire has been worked into the cables and cannot be removed.

We know that this has been going on for two months, and the

probability is that it extends as far back as last January.

At Haig's expense, 150 wires were added to each cable.

The trustees tried to keep the incident quiet, and awarded

the next contract for suspenders to John Roebling's sons.

September 1880, Brooklyn Eagle.

Mr. J.

Lloyd Haig, who figured more or less in connection with the big bridge,

is breaking boulders in Sing Sing.

The health of Colonel Roebling is considerably

improved, but he is still unable to leave his home.

Although an invalid, his attention to the details of the bridge is as keen as ever,

and all matters of importance pass under his revision.

Man is, after all, a very finite being in capacities and powers of doing actual work.

But when it comes to planning, one mind can, in a few hours, think out

enough work to keep a thousand men employed for years.

Roadway, 1878 to 1883.

In 1879, at the ten-year mark, all that remained to be constructed was

the superstructure, the roadway between the two cities.

Everything that had gone before it, the caissons, the towers, the cables,

and the anchorages, all these were built to support and suspend the roadway.

August 10th, 1881.

A lighter load of steel arrived at the bridge dock yesterday, but it did not

include the sections for which we are waiting.

Floor beams are what are wanted, and until they are received, not much

progress can be made with the superstructure.

September 7th, 1882.

It is officially announced that no steel was received last week.

What is the matter with the Edgemoor Company this time?

One end of the Brooklyn Bridge is falling down of old age, but they hope to have the

other end completed in time to make some repairs on

the first end before the other end falls down also.

The delays were incredible and embarrassing.

The Board of Trustees, now run by several newly elected reform politicians,

was worried about bad press and eager to please the public with positive actions.

But their urgency to complete the bridge was without any real interest for the

bridge itself, and with little or no comprehension of

the human effort that had brought the project this far.

Many of them had never even met the Chief Engineer.

I am convinced that at every possible point there is

a weakness in the management of the Brooklyn Bridge.

The engineering part of the structure, the

most important, is in the hands of a sick man.

He was the perfect scapegoat.

He hadn't been seen at the bridge site for 11 years.

Only the assistant engineers knew how crucial he was to the success of the

bridge, that he still carried the entire responsibility.

You must trust me insofar that the moment I am unable to do full justice to my

duties as Chief Engineer, I shall give you ample warning.

Finding no better excuse for the delays, several

trustees attempted to remove Washington Roebling.

They were, by the narrowest of margins, defeated.

Probably one reason why perfect harmony did not exist in the

board was that there were four candidates for governor on it.

If the board of trustees had failed to remember that it

was the bridge that mattered, Washington Roebling had not.

He got his floor beams, and for seven more months, he

quietly and carefully supervised the finishing work.

And then, in early May of 1883, the bridge was ready to carry its first passenger.

It was Emily Roebling.

She rode across in an open carriage, carrying a rooster, a symbol of victory.

The East River Bridge will be open to the public Thursday, May 24th, at 2 o'clock.

Colonel and Mrs. Washington A.

Roebling request the honor of your company

after the opening ceremonies until 7 o 'clock.

The completed bridge was so grand, so stately and

magnificent, such a source of pride, that all was forgiven.

The wire fraud, boss tweed, the delays and doubts, all the criticism of the chief

engineer, all were swept away by the irrefutable fact of the bridge itself.

The United City staged the greatest celebration ever seen in New York.

Everybody had the day off.

Every business closed.

The President, Chester A.

Arthur, presided with some 50,000 others from out of town.

Hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers and Brooklynites.

After dark, 14 tons of fireworks exploded for more than an hour.

And the chief engineer was, at last, the unchallenged hero.

Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first?

The earth be spanned, connected by network, the lands be welded together.

Walt Whitman.

music

Like the folks you meet on, like to plant my feet on, the Brooklyn Bridge.

What a lovely view from

I love to listen to the wind through her

strings, the song that she sings for the town.

I love to look up at the clouds in her hair, she's learned to wear like a crown.

Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Bridge.

You see that bridge?

Well I taught about it lots of times looking at it out of my window.

They call it the eighth wonder of the world.

People come from everywhere just to look at it.

If a guy jumped off that bridge, the whole world would know about it.

This is the famous Brooklyn Bridge.

133 feet high, 1500 feet long.

Contains hundreds of miles of cable.

From it... Steve Brody made his sensational leap into the East River.

Hey, it is love.

Well, what's the matter?

Can't I even take a look at your girl?

That's the Brooklyn Bridge.

Sure.

That's my pinup, girl.

Isn't she a beauty?

That's the first mistake we've made since that guy sold us the Brooklyn Bridge.

Oh, buying that bridge was no mistake.

That's gonna be worth a lot of money to us someday.

If the bridge isn't part of our life, if it doesn't add

to the quality of our thought, it really doesn't exist.

A bridge is.

Nothing really lasts except what can be translated

into terms using the human spirit, the human mind.

If it doesn't make its impression on the mind, it will vanish very quickly.

No matter how much power or riches is behind it.

This was the work of an engineer who was also a great artist.

A man whom one might dare to mention, almost in the same breath as Leonardo da Vinci.

People forget not only when it was built, 현재, They forget it was built in an age

when materials were brought up to the bridge in a horse and wagon.

When rivets were hand thrown.

When there was no telephone to signal from the top of the

caissons down into the interior where the men were working.

When they were using black powder down inside the caisson.

When there were no jackhammers to work with.

When Derek's cranes were made out of wood.

It was built in the horse and buggy days.

And it was built by hand.

Al Smith used to say the Brooklyn Bridge was handmade.

Well, he was right.

It was.

The thing about the Brooklyn Bridge in the end is that it is just so beautiful.

And I think that's what's moved poets, sculptors, painters, not to mention

architects, to sing its praise for all these

nearly hundred years since it's been finished.

The bridge is the archetypal monument, really.

It's all we want of a monument.

I think it has great noble scale, which a monument must have.

Yet it has something to relate it to human scale at the same time.

And it feels very much like a public place.

It's a place for all of us.

And I think that's crucial to good monumental architecture.

That it must have some relationship to the shared needs of society.

I was born in 1873.

The 17th day of March.

I was between 10 and 11 years of age.

I was a water boy.

Had two pills in my hand and a hook.

And put salt and lemon in the water in the summertime.

Don't drink no water.

No, no, no water.

Less to put salt and lemon in there.

They paid me a dollar and ten cent a day.

And they paid me good.

Because a whole lot of young boys didn't get that.

Not that I was the smartest fellow in the world.

But I was very active.

Brooklyn Bridge first belonged to the leg.

It was a temptation to walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.

To be able to walk out on that bridge was a thrill

that we have to use our imagination to appreciate.

In a day when a six-story building was considered tall, people were suddenly able

to walk up, out over a river higher than

they'd ever been in their lives, above ground.

To look out over the harbor.

To look out over both cities.

To be out where seagulls sweep below their feet, underneath the bridge.

It was like climbing a mountain.

If, in their imagination, you were climbing a river when you walked over the bridge.

Say, can this cab take me to the bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge?

Let's go.

This cab will take you any place you want to go.

Come on, get in.

Wait a minute.

Hold it.

Hold it.

Stop.

This is it.

Here it is.

I love to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.

To be standing out in the center of the Brooklyn Bridge on a good spring day in

the city of New York with the wind blowing is one of the great places in America.

It's like being on the rim of the Grand Canyon.

And nobody should miss it.

And the fact that it's a man-created environment,

to me, makes it all the more exciting.

I'm really a down-to-earth sort of man, so I've had very few such experiences.

I have friends who have transcendental visions

almost every night, but I've had these very rarely.

One of them, and it made a deep impression on

me, was in the walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.

I've walked over all the bridges, but the Brooklyn Bridge was my favorite.

And one March afternoon, I started over on the Brooklyn side.

The wind was blowing.

There were heavy clouds in the sky moving around.

But the sky was light enough to give a complete

silhouette of the skyscrapers on the New York side.

I began walking over it.

And the course of it, I had a sense of the great star of

life, the vitality, the power that lay beneath everything.

There were the ships and tugs going up the East River.

There were little curls of steam coming out of the skyscrapers.

There was the sound of traffic on the bridge itself.

And I was walking, young and feeling happily alone.

And I had a sense almost of my whole career, or the world

that I was going to live in, being laid out before me.

I had a sense of the power and glory of the present world.

In the spring of 1926, it was obvious to everyone that he was failing rapidly.

By May, he was down to less than 100 pounds.

Think not that I am improving, he wrote.

Growing weaker daily.

Head bowed down in sheer apathy.

Bones crack when rolled over, fall down when I try to stand.

Please leave me alone and in peace.

But then he added a P.S.

A surprise.

For several years, ten, a night-blooming cereus

stock has been knocked about in the greenhouse.

Last night, it suddenly bloomed.

It was brought to my bedside at 10 p.m.

.

.

.

.

A delicate odor filled the room, a wonderful flower, much larger than a rose.

This morning, it is gone.

To sleep the sleep of ages again.

He lingered on for two more months.

The only thing he had left, he said, was his brain.

And for that, he added, he was extremely grateful.

I'm

always here, and I know he's going to be right here!

There was a moment when in my generation, back in the 20s, the generation of the

20s, when the Brooklyn Bridge dawned on us.

Each one of us saw the dawn from a different angle.

But there it was, and it declared itself important, and this wasn't something that

was exclusive to literary people or intellectuals.

It was something that the ordinary man felt, too, because he'd watched it.

He'd walked back and forth over the bridge.

In 1924, the poet Hart Crane moved to 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn, to the same

room that Washington Roebling occupied as he

directed the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.

There, Crane worked on his epic poem about America.

To Brooklyn Bridge.

How many dawns chill from his rippling rest The seagull's wings shall dip and

pivot him Shedding white rings of tumult Building high over the chained bay water's

liberty Then within violet curve forsake our eyes As apparitional as sails that

cross some page of figures To be filed away Till elevators drop us from our day I

think of cinemas, panoramic slights With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene

Never disclosed, but hastened to again Foretold to other eyes on the same screen

And thee across the harbor Silver-paced as though the sun took step of thee Yet left

some motion ever unspent in thy stride Implicitly thy freedom staying thee.

People working during the 20s whom he knew and knew well, Joseph Stella in painting,

George O'Keefe in painting, in photography, Alfred Stiglitz, Bernice

Abbott, in literature, John Dos Passos, Waldo Frank, all friends of Crane,

were all involved in this same effort to see the linking value of a bridge that

meant more than just a way to get somebody from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back again.

For more great photos of George O'Keefe and his show, And make sure you turn on

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So, it's the growing consensus, visible through people's acts,

and then gradually seeps into thoughts and

becomes part of the texture of their lives.

It goes into pictures, it goes into poems, and before you know it, there it is.

Unescapably grand, and solid, and indestructible

in the way ordinary works of art are not.

If you've been a rover, the journey's end lies over the Brooklyn bridge.

Don't let no one tell you that I've been trying to sell you the Brooklyn bridge.

You'll miss her most when you roam, cause you'll

think of her and think of home, the good old Brooklyn.

The towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are a sort of gothic monument.

They really tie the Brooklyn Bridge to the masonry city of the 19th century,

while the Great Roadway in effect symbolizes

the more modern city of the 20th century.

And for a gate, for a symbol, one needs more than a sheer piece of technology.

One needs something that expresses some sort of cultural meaning as well.

And a great gothic archway is a very noble entrance to a city.

Didn't you hear that siren?

Tarzan.

I remember Louis Kahn, the great American architect who died a couple of years ago,

talked of great art as not the fulfillment of the great American architect,

but the filling of a desire, but the making of a new desire.

He said that the world never really needed Beethoven's Fifth

Symphony until he wrote it, and now we couldn't live without it.

In a certain way, it's the same thing with the Brooklyn Bridge.

We didn't really need it.

We could have gotten across the river either in boats

or in some uglier or very different looking bridge.

But now that it's there, now that it's there, we couldn't imagine a world without it.

I feel that the, that the bridge makes a difference.

It makes one feel better about being alive.

I think it makes you glad that you're part of the human community, that you're part

of a species that could create such a structure.

We are builders, and when we see something that we've built well, our hats are off.

We stand there and say, isn't it marvelous?

But isn't it marvelous that it was built by people, people like you and I?

People like...

We would like to be, at least, and brave, courage, the tenacity of those

people, the confidence, all of those are, they sound like platitudes, they're truths.

They're simple truths, but some truths need repeating,

generation after generation after generation.

And the Brooklyn Bridge continues to repeat truths that we need to remember.

As a matter of fact, there's nothing one can say about the Brooklyn Bridge.

...the Brooklyn Bridge that the Brooklyn Bridge

hasn't already said to us and impressed upon us.

So our minds have been affected by it, even when we're unconscious of it, I think.

And it's part of our real inheritance.

We realize eventually that the scenes and

actions of everyday life have a further future.

Not in a remote heaven, but in the minds of countless people.

And that these scenes and acts and dreams then become

transformed and permanently part of the human heritage.

Although we couldn't single out any one person in a crowd and say, that's the man

who's been affected by the Brooklyn Bridge.

But millions of us have.

See, the city is fundamentally a practical utilitarian invention.

It always was.

And suddenly you see this steel portrait.

It's a shock.

It puts everything to shame.

And it makes you wonder what else we could have done that was so marvelous.

And so unpresumptuous.

It carries its weights.

It does what it's supposed to do.

And yet, I mean, they could have built another Manhattan Bridge, couldn't they?

And he didn't.

He really aspired to do something gorgeous.

So, it makes you feel that maybe you're...

you too could add something that would last and be beautiful.

Anything more you want to know?

Nope.

That's enough, son.

I'll buy it.