Despite being the third largest U.S city, mainly due to cheap housing, Brooklyn was a rural community. However, all the jobs were across the East River in New York City. By 1868, more than 50 million commuters crossed the East River by ferry each year, overcoming the geographical separation between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The Brooklyn Bridge led to the 1898 merger that created Greater New York, the New York you know today. At its completion in 1883, it was named the eighth wonder of the world.
Today it’s arguably America’s most iconic structure, a marvel of engineering and a symbol of human ingenuity. This is the story of America’s first mega project.
Pioneering Vision: John Roebling’s Dream Takes Shape
In 1831, a young 25-year-old German man by the name of John A. Roebling sailed to America and founded a community of German immigrants in Pennsylvania, where he later married Johanna Herting and had a son, which they named Washington. He named his town Saxonburg and envisioned it as a kind of Utopia. He studied mathematics, architecture, and hydraulics at the Polytechnic Institute in Berlin, but he became a farmer once he settled in Pennsylvania.
In 1837, Roebling attained American citizenship, yet he remained personally and professionally unfulfilled, a visionary searching for his true purpose. So, he shifted his focus to engineering. The meadow behind the church in Saxonburg was his personal laboratory, where he spent the summer of 1841 weaving iron wires into a 600-foot-long cable. This new invention became an instant success and quickly outshone the commonly used hemp cables, getting orders from all industries, which would fundamentally transform and redefine the landscape of America during the Industrial Revolution.
Roebling’s engineering career took off when he won his first commission in 1844, leading to the delivery of the world’s first suspension aqueduct over Pittsburgh’s Allegheny River just nine months later, which would support two thousand tons of water on which floated canal barges. By the early 1850s, he had already established himself as the greatest bridge builder of his time.
During the winter of 1852, the 45-year-old Roebling was stranded aboard an ice-clogged ferry on the East River, which ignited a dream to build a bridge across the river. But the technology to build such a large-scale structure simply did not exist. The bridge would need to be exceptionally strong to withstand the turbulent saltwater of the East River and have over 130 feet high navigational clearance to permit ocean-going vessels to pass underneath.
Additionally, the distance is over a mile long. To put it into perspective, it would have to be twice the length of the Cincinnati Covington Bridge, which he would later build in 1866 over the Ohio River and take the title of the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time.
By 1867, Roebling battled severe depression following the death of his wife and the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln. To cope with his loss, he turned to seances where he summoned the spirits of his departed loved ones. But the one thing that gave him hope and kept him going was his plan for an East River Bridge. No one asked Roebling to build a bridge; his ambition was entirely self-driven.
So, unsolicited, he went to New York to promote his concept. He envisioned a two-level six-thousand-foot-long bridge supported by cables anchored to masonry blocks on each shore. It would have 270-foot-high twin towers, with each featuring two 100-foot-high Gothic arches resembling cathedral windows. Despite facing rejection and significant opposition, on June 21, 1869, Roebling’s unrelenting passion eventually convinced Congress to grant him permission to build the iconic Brooklyn Bridge.
Roebling’s construction plan consisted of sinking two massive boxes called caissons at the bottom of the river and filling them with concrete. The bridge’s twin towers would be built on top of the caissons after he would build limestone and concrete anchorages on each shore and spin cables from one side to the other across the tops of the towers. Finally, the cables would support the roadway framework.
Work on the bridge began shortly after receiving approval from Congress. But unfortunately, he would die three weeks later after suffering a foot injury on the site. After his toes were crushed by a ferry and amputated without anesthetic at his request, he refused conventional treatment, believing that bathing his wound in hot water was nature’s remedy. He succumbed to tetanus and passed away on July 22, 1869.
Washington Roebling Determination – Brooklyn Bridge Construction
Soon after, his son Washington took over as chief engineer, despite the lack of experience except for a few small bridges he built for the Union Army while he was a colonel in the Civil War. Washington was determined to implement his father’s groundbreaking design. Washington studied the use of caissons but had never actually employed them. It would take three years and numerous deaths before the caissons were installed.
The Brooklyn caisson, which cost over one hundred thousand dollars and weighed 3,000 tons, one thousand tons more than the biggest merchant ship of the era, was towed to its location on May 3rd, 1870. The enormous iron-reinforced wooden box, open at the bottom, would be sunk to the muddy riverbed. The grueling work of excavating the mud and rock was done by hundreds of low-paid laborers who entered the caisson through an airlock built into its roof to get to the bottom of the caisson in the pressurized working room.
The more mud they shoveled out, the deeper the caisson would sink, hoping it would reach bedrock. Life in the caisson was brutal, and to most workers, it must have felt like Dante’s Inferno. Workers endured arduous and hazardous labor in unbearable heat and no light, except for the dim calcium lamps. More than 100 would quit weekly, but they were replaced just as fast by other Irish, German, and Italian immigrants willing to work for a steady two dollars a day salary.
The most serious risk they would face was a mysterious malady known as caisson disease or the bends, symptoms such as vomiting, severe cramps, paralysis, and even death affected one-third of the caisson workers. Tragically, no one realized in the 1870s that it was caused by extremely fast decompression; the quicker they came out from the great depth of the caisson, the higher the risk. On the evening of September 28, 1869, Washington, who always worked alongside his men, experienced his first attack of the bends. He was rushed home after collapsing and eventually recovered.
The Brooklyn caisson had finally hit bedrock at 45 feet by mid-March 1871, and the New York caisson was launched on May 8. Washington Roebling reduced the work shift from eight hours to five hours, but the disease continued to spread. Three men died of the bends the following week, and on May 8, 1872, the entire caisson workforce went on strike, yet most of them returned three days later, coaxed by a 75 cents per day salary increase. On May 18, 1872, three more workers passed away, and the New York caisson would forever remain at a depth of 78.5 feet on a bed of crusted solid sand.
A few nights later, after examining the concrete in the caisson, Washington collapsed again. He was basically on his deathbed for several days but miraculously recovered and went back to work. Despite enduring further attacks every week, he returned to work and oversaw the caissons until their completion, but Washington would never regain his health; he became an invalid plagued by severe pains and haunted by visions of his own death. He would not return to the bridge during its construction.
Meanwhile, work on the bridge continued under the supervision of his wife, Emily Roebling. It took four years to build each of the massive 59 feet wide and 140 feet long granite towers. As of June 1st, 1872, when the Brooklyn Tower reached a height of 100 feet, it was still wider than it was tall, and at the same time, it dwarfed all buildings in sight. However, the height also made working conditions dangerous, and sadly, five workers died after falling from the towers, while another four were crushed by stones.
Despite Washington’s absence, the Brooklyn Tower was completed in June 1875, and the New York tower was finished the following year in July 1876, standing at an impressive height of 278 feet. Confined to his sick bed, Washington could only imagine the grandeur of the twin towers.
The anchorages were also completed in 1876, which consisted of four massive iron plates weighing 23 tons each that were situated deep within the structure. These iron plates were secured to a series of iron bars that curved upward through the masonry, providing a solid anchor for the four main cables of the bridge. On August 14, 1876, a 6,800-foot-long thin steel cable was extended, connecting New York and Brooklyn for the very first time, while six thousand people cheered from the shores.
Eleven days later, the master mechanic named Frank Farrington became the first person ever to go from one tower to the other in a 22-minute ride using a makeshift chair and steam-powered pulleys. An unstable 48-inch-wide temporary footbridge was built for the use of workmen, but it quickly became a tourist attraction, and passes were given to thousands of visitors to cross the river by footbridge. Although too frail to go to the site, Washington Roebling returned to Brooklyn and moved into a house where he could see the bridge through binoculars from his bedroom window.
Each of the bridge’s four cables contained 19 strands with 282 parallel wires in each strand, totaling 3,500 miles of wire. Connecting the strands to anchor bars posed a significant danger due to the high strain of 75 tons on each strand. On June 14, 1878, a steel rope holding a strand broke, causing one worker’s immediate death and flinging another 80 feet away who died shortly after. Washington discovered that the Brooklyn wire maker J. Lloyd Haye, who supplied all seven million pounds of wire for the strands, bribed inspectors to use faulty wire.
Luckily, the bridge was designed to be six times stronger than required, which gave Washington confidence in its safety. He demanded the manufacturer to supply good wire to make up for the bad wires already in place, but Haye was never penalized for this fraud.
So far, the construction costs were paid only by the city of Brooklyn, as New York claimed that the bridge is unsafe. But after a lawsuit was filed against the Metropolis in May 1879, the courts forced New York to pay their share. The same year, steel suspenders were added to the cables, but it took two more years to complete the installation of the eight thousand pound steel floor beams. In late 1881, Washington requested to reinforce the roadway with an additional thousand tons of steel, bringing the total cost of the bridge to 15 million dollars, the equivalent of about half a billion in today’s dollars.
This was unheard of at the time, and in fact, engineers tried saving money using less steel well into the 20th century, resulting in unstable bridges like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in Washington, which collapsed dramatically due to a 45-mile-an-hour wind in 1940. Misfortune overtakes the great structure.
Without the additional steel, it would have lacked the rigidity to support the automotive traffic that came in the following century. It took 14 years, claimed numerous lives, and cost over 15 million dollars, but the Brooklyn Bridge finally opened on May 24, 1883. The inauguration ceremony had several distinguished guests, including America’s 21st president, Chester A. Arthur, and New York’s Governor Grover Cleveland, who later became the 22nd and 24th U.S president. Washington’s wife, Emily, accompanied by her coachman, became the first people to ever cross the Brooklyn Bridge. The only person absent from the festivities was Washington Roebling himself; he watched the events from his bedroom window.
Brooklyn Bridge Stampede Incident
Unfortunately, just a week after the inauguration on May 30th, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge claimed even more lives. An article in the New York Times read, “In a moment the whole stairway was packed with dead and dying men, women, and children piled upon another in a writhing, struggling mass.
” You see, predictions of the Brooklyn Bridge’s collapse were very common, and when a woman’s heel got caught in the planks of the pedestrian promenade, she started screaming from the top of her lungs, prompting another woman to scream that the bridge is falling. Panic ensued, and 12 people were trampled to death on the stairways, while hundreds more were injured, many seriously.
Pedestrians were charged one penny to cross the bridge, so in the aftermath of the disaster, it was concluded that a total of 97,224 people paid the toll that day, which was actually less than the previous Sunday when 163,500 people had crossed. Despite the fact that there were no structural issues with the bridge, the stampede incident had a profound impact on the people’s perception of it.
However, on May 17, 1884, faith in the Brooklyn Bridge was restored. The famous American showman PT Barnum used the tragedy as an opportunity to showcase the bridge’s remarkable strength and to promote his circus. He had 21 elephants, 10 camels, and seven dromedaries march across the bridge.
East River Bridges and Tunnels
In the following years, several more bridges and eventually over a dozen tunnels were constructed over and under the East River. However, only the handmade Brooklyn Bridge seems to reach out and convey a unique message of grit, determination, and human ingenuity.
