Happy Birthday to the Brooklyn Bridge! There would be no New York City without it.
It opened 126 years ago this week, on May 24, 1883. And what a story is locked within its web of steel cables and granite towers! It is the romance, the very story of New York itself -- a monument to the tenacity and courage of a father and son who built it and sacrificed their lives in the process.
John Roebling was 25 -- a brilliant engineer -- when he came to the city from Germany. He had one overriding ambition -- to build a great suspension bridge between Brooklyn and New York. At the time, they were separate cities and there was no bridge between Manhattan and Long Island. You had to take a ferry to get across the East River.
It took many years but, finally, Roebling convinced a group of businessmen to sponsor the project. Yet, even before construction began, Roebling's foot was crushed between a ferry and a wharf and he died a few days later.
His 32-year-old son, Washington Roebling, took over the project. Three years later, the younger Roebling was stricken with the bends, the underwater pressure disease that can result from working in a caisson deep in the river. He was partially paralyzed and endured years of suffering. Still the project went on and Roebling's resourceful wife, Emily, was able to bring it to a sucessful conclusion. Her stricken husband watched the progress of the work through a spyglass from their home in Brooklyn Heights and Emily transmitted his orders to the workers.
May 24, 1883, was a festive, sunny day. Flags fluttered from buildings and boats in the East River. Tens of thousands of people gathered at each end of the bridge. Ships sounded their horns. The President of the United States, Chester Arthur, came up from Washington with members of his cabinet. New York's governor, Grover Cleveland, was present as were the mayors of the two cities, Seth Low, the youngest mayor in Brooklyn's history at that point, and New York Mayor Franklin Edson.
Washingon Roebling was unable to come because of his condition. As historian Edward Ellis relates it, "Tended by his misty-eyed wife, he sat at a window of their Brooklyn Heights home to watch the event through field glasses held in trembling hands. He choked with pride in his accomplishment and he ached with pain because his father had not lived to share the moment of exultation."
Later, the President and the official party walked over the bridge to Roebling's home where, Ellis wrote, they took his hand, bowed low and paid homage "to the engineer who had sacrificed his health to build the Brooklyn Bridge."
Tragedy and the bridge seemed linked. Only six days after the bridge opened, people celebrating the Memorial Day holiday were enjoying the walk across when somebody spread the false word that the bridge was falling and caused a panic. There was a stampede. People tried desperately to get off the bridge, pushing, clawing each other. Twelve people were trampled to death and 35 were injured.
But the bridge fused the two cities and, ultimately, was responsible for the birth of a greater New York.
