Soaring Structures Capture The Imagination

Few Have A Stronger Hold Than The Brooklyn Bridge, With Its Grace And Human Drama

Hart Crane wrote poetry about it. Joseph Stella painted it. Woody Allen romanced Diane Keaton in front of it. Dave Frieder? The New York photographer has actually climbed the Brooklyn Bridge, lugging 80 pounds of camera equipment up the massive steel cables to one of the Gothic towers high above the East River. From that perch, he could see past the opposite tower, over the cityscape, and into New Jersey. "It's such an incredible contrast," he says of the view. "Here's a bridge built in the late 1800s standing above all of downtown Manhattan."

Somehow, the Brooklyn Bridge looks equally at home in Frieder's late-20th-century photos and the earliest sepia prints taken 120 years ago, when it connected two separate cities then expanding only horizontally. It's still one of the most visible symbols in a town that doesn't lack for them. Behind the symbol is a story of genius, illness, family conflict, and a woman who was ahead of her time.

Brooklyn is now New York City's largest borough, but 150 years ago, although growing quickly, it was considered a cowtown by its neighbors across the river. Although Brooklyn and New York are separated by no more than a mile in places, the journey by ferry could take more than an hour in the winter, when the East River froze over and slowed the boats. In 1852, one of those chilled and grumpy commuters was actually in the position to do something about it. John Augustus Roebling, a German immigrant and engineer, was a technical genius — he had introduced iron wire rope to the United States and was using it in his current project, a suspension bridge over the Niagara gorge. He was also obsessed by weird diets, seances, and mystical philosophy and was not an easygoing man. "His domestic life can be summed up in a few words, domineering tyranny," wrote his son, Washington, in a candid biography, Life of John A. Roebling. Washington continued: "It was a fortunate thing that his engineering engagements kept him away for prolonged periods, otherwise his children would all have died young."

Were Freud and his theories not decades in the future, the psychoanalyst would certainly have had choice words about the Roeblings and their roles in the bridge project. John Roebling was chosen as engineer for the bridge in 1867, when the state legislature created a private company to build it. And despite his feelings toward his domineering father, Washington, also a civil engineer, ended up becoming a key figure in the construction of the bridge. Father and son were surveying the Brooklyn tower site in 1869 when a ferry crashed into the pilings and crushed John's toes. Deeply skeptical of medical doctors, he accepted amputation (without anesthetic) but refused any further treatment beyond a series of water cures. He developed tetanus, and as his jaw locked and made speech impossible, he wrote notes about the bridge and his financial affairs. He died of the disease less than a month later.

It fell to Washington, wracked by guilt over his failure to warn his father of the ferry's approach, to carry out the ambitious vision. The structure would be the longest suspension bridge in the world, with a span of more than 1,595 feet between the towers. Heresy of heresies, it would use cables woven of steel, stronger than the usual iron but rare in bridges. And its towers would require underwater foundations, built using open-bottomed, airtight wood-and-iron boxes called caissons that rested on the river bottom — 44 feet below the water's surface for the Brooklyn tower, and 78 feet for the Manhattan side. Workers were literally sealed inside, where they would dig deeply into the riverbed to sink the foundation.

Working in the caissons was like working in a coffin, and not only because of the cramped and stuffy conditions. In 1870, a fire broke out in one, forcing Washington to flood the caisson to put it out. And because of the high air pressure in the underwater work site, ascending too quickly to the surface caused a poorly understood illness, then called caisson disease and now known as the bends. In the spring of 1872, caisson disease — characterized by joint pain, skin rashes, and even paralysis — struck the chief engineer himself.

Labor of love

Washington nearly died, and although he attempted to return to the work site, soon he was simply physically unable to supervise the project. After a recuperative trip to Germany, he and his family moved to Trenton, N.J.

How would the chief engineer communicate with his crew? Enter Emily Roebling, Washington's wife. He had fallen in love with her when he was in the Union Army during the Civil War — she was the sister of his commanding officer — and remained completely smitten with her. Emily, says scholar Vivian Thiele, was athletic, smart, and an utter clotheshorse. When her husband fell ill, she wrote letters and read correspondence from the assistant engineers. After the family moved back to Brooklyn, in 1876, she became his on-site representative. Eventually she administered her husband's financial affairs and helped support him during at least two failed attempts to remove him as chief engineer.

Some historians have elevated her to the level of engineer, but Thiele is wary of that description. Rather than engineering, "she was very good at public relations," always ready to defend her husband's reputation, says Thiele, who oversees the collection of Roebling letters and materials at the Archibald S. Alexander Library at Rutgers University.

There was plenty to tax Emily's PR skills. The project was constantly beset by accusations of bribery, political machinations, and plain old doubt. "Every possible accusation was made," wrote Washington. "The bridge would fall down, the wind would blow it down, it would never pay, nobody would ever use it, it damaged the shipping interests, it was too long to walk over it, it would never compete with the ferries, the cost would be so great that the cities would be ruined, etc."

In May 1883, a week before the bridge's official opening, Emily asked to cross it in a horse-drawn carriage to demonstrate its safety. She chose an unusual symbol of victory as a traveling partner: a live rooster. On the day itself, the chief engineer watched the festivities from his window in Brooklyn before he and Emily hosted a reception attended by President Chester Arthur.

The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge

Nothing was really ever the same after the 13-year project was finished. Not for Washington; his firm went on to make wire rope for bridges including the George Washington and Golden Gate, and he even led the business again for five years toward the end of his life. (He did this all without Emily, who died in 1903.) Not for Brooklyn, which grew to be the country's third-largest city before becoming a borough in 1898. Not for New York City; in his book The Great Bridge, historian David McCullough wrote that the bridge can be seen as the gateway to the city's modern era — introducing the steel later used to build the skyscrapers that dwarfed even the bridge's mammoth towers.

When "the wise man" crosses the Brooklyn Bridge, Harper's New Monthly magazine wrote in 1883, "he will linger to get the good of the splendid sweep of view about him, which his esthetic self will admit pays wonderful interest on his investment of nothing." Frieder, the photographer, can no longer linger at the top of the bridge for the most splendid view of all; post-September 11 security concerns have put a temporary halt to his climbs. He hopes authorities ease their restrictions soon. "I'm heartbroken," he says. "I'm dying to get back up there."

Eads Bridge

Eads' interest in the river had always been inspired by his vision of St. Louis as a key player in a national, and one day international, network of markets. Without cheap transportation, St. Louis wouldn't flourish. When railways began to replace waterways as the highways of commerce, Eads shifted his attention from the steamboats to locomotives. When the river got in the way, he focused on solving the problem.

By the 1860s, if St Louis were going to continue as the gateway to the West, the city had to have a bridge. Reaching the ferry docks from the railway stations in St. Louis and East St. Louis was an incredible ordeal. The river crossing was frightening and dangerous at the best of times, and impossible when the water was low or the river froze. Goods could be delayed for weeks. One observer wrote: "It is a pity that Dante, when he wrote his "Inferno," had no knowledge of the tortures of the transfer between St. Louis and East St. Louis in those times. Had he known of it he would have let the condemned be taken across the dark waters by that method, instead of having them rowed over by Charon in a comparatively peaceful way."

What Eads did was to offer to build a bridge that was quite revolutionary. Instead of a truss design, the conventional form for railway bridges at the time, he suggested building an arched bridge, with spans in excess of 500 feet. To make sure it was strong enough, he wanted to build the arches of steel that was stronger than the wrought iron typically used in railroad bridges. To experienced bridge-builders, Eads' bridge may have seemed as crazy as building a railway line to transport ocean-liners seems to us today. One critic wrote: "I deem it entirely unsafe and impracticable." Arrogant and vain, Eads belittled his opponents and insisted on the infallibility of his calculations and the laws of physics. He proved himself right. Though the bridge took seven years to construct and cost more than a dozen men's lives, it was a magnificent structure. And unlike scores of 19th century truss bridges that collapsed under the weight of trains, the Eads bridge still stands to this day.

When it opened on July 4, 1874, Eads was treated like a hero by the 300,000 people who turned out to take part in the celebration. He had, they believed, built a bridge that would ensure the city's greatness. One citizen wrote: "no work of man on the globe so thoroughly combines the useful and the beautiful as the grand steel bridge which stretches its graceful line across the Mississippi at St. Louis. …" The St. Louis women's publication Central Magazine claimed that "James B. Eads is the greatest engineer on the American continent and his work, the great St. Louis Bridge is the greatest structure of the kind in the world."

But it was Eads' next work that was perhaps his most significant. Once again, the problem involved an obstruction to transportation. This time the obstacle was in the mouth of the Mississippi. As the river approaches the Gulf of Mexico it spreads and gradually slows, depositing its huge load of sediment. Ships frequently ran aground on the sandbars that formed. In the 1860s the sandbars effectively blockaded the port of New Orleans for weeks at a time, leaving food and produce to rot on the docks. The Army Corps of Engineers' efforts to keep the channel open had been totally ineffective. In 1869 an exasperated New Orleans Picayune reporter complained: "It is idle for us to rely upon the Government dredge machine now at Pass-a-l'Outre, for experience has proved that the most she can accomplish is to occasionally break her propeller and steam up to the city for another."

In 1874, under tremendous pressure to do something, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed building a canal from below New Orleans to the Gulf. Eads thought the scheme was ludicrous. He suggested instead that lawmakers contract with him to build jetties, or underwater walls running parallel to the current of the river. To make the offer irresistible, he proposed building the jetties without any advance payment; the government would only pay him if the jetties worked.

Eads' plan was to build the jetties at the point where the Mississippi meets the Gulf. The jetties would create a narrower channel, which would speed up the water running between them. The faster water flowed, the more sediment it would carry. Eads claimed the extra force would be enough to carve out the sandbars and carry the sediment into the Gulf. He was hired to build the jetties; Congress agreed to pay him certain amounts of money as he reached certain depths, so that by the time he reached the 30-foot depth he would be paid $4.25 million.

Eads' interference in Army Corps jurisdiction made him some very powerful enemies in Washington, including the Chief of the Army Engineers, Andrew Atkinson Humphreys. Once Eads won the contract to build the jetties, Humphreys tried on numerous occasions to sabotage the project. But Eads was a formidable opponent. A friend described Eads as "… a bitter and unrelenting foe. … To him the unfolding of great and correct principles was more than personal friendships. His beliefs were his friends." An often vicious debate between Eads and Humphreys played out in the press, with members of the public taking sides. In the end, Eads proved his point. When the jetties were finally completed in 1879, they created a 30-foot deep channel, one that ensured ships could get into and out of New Orleans. The city went from being the ninth largest to the second largest port in the nation, after New York.

The jetties sealed Eads' reputation as a master of river engineering. News of his success spread worldwide. The Brazilians, British and Canadians, among others, invited him to consult on navigation problems. In July 1884, Britain's Royal Society of the Arts awarded Eads the Albert Medal for "services he had rendered to the art of engineering." He was the first American to receive the honor. On the wave of his new-found celebrity, Eads found a fabulous new project for his boundless energy.

The Ship Railway scheme was not his idea, but without him it would never have come as far as it did. In 1886, after Eads had lobbied relentlessly for years on behalf of the project, a Ship Railway Bill, that would have given him a sanctioning charter, passed the Senate. But Eads was not in Washington to witness that victory. Exhausted, he had followed doctors' orders and sailed to the Bahamas to rest. On March 8, 1887 James Eads died. His bill was never voted on in the House; Speaker Carlisle denied it the few minutes necessary for consideration.

Eads' death was mourned in papers around the country. Reporters almost universally recognized him as a giant of inventiveness and reasoning, a man to whom the nation owed a huge debt of gratitude. His passing also marked the end of an era. In the increasingly specialized worlds of 20th century science and technology, it would become much harder for an uneducated boy from St. Louis, someone born without pedigree or connections, to be able to challenge graduates of the best engineering colleges in the country and prove them wrong.

Katherine Hobson. High and mighty. . June 30, 2003.