Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest
suspension
bridges in the
USA. Completed in 1883, it connects the New
York City
boroughs of
Manhattan and
Brooklyn by
spanning the East
River. With a
main span of 1,595.5 feet, it was the longest
suspension bridge in the world from its
opening until 1903, and the first steel-wire suspension bridge. Originally
referred to as the New York and
Brooklyn Bridge and as the East
River Bridge, it was dubbed the Brooklyn Bridge in a 25th of January
1867 letter to the editor of the Brooklyn
Daily Eagle, and
formally so named by the city government in 1915. Since its opening, it has
become an iconic part of the New York skyline. It was
designated a National
Historic Landmark in 1964
and a National
Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in
1972. Construction: The Brooklyn Bridge was initially designed by German immigrant John Augustus Roebling, who had previously designed and constructed shorter suspension bridges, such as Roebling's Delaware Aqueduct in Pennsylvania, Waco Suspension Bridge in Waco, Texas, and the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio. While conducting surveys for the bridge project, Roebling sustained a crush injury to his foot when a ferry pinned it against a piling. After amputation of his crushed toes he developed a tetanus infection which left him incapacitated and soon resulted in his death, not long after he had placed his 32-year-old son Washington Roebling in charge of the project. Washington Roebling also suffered a paralysing injury as a result of decompression sickness shortly after the beginning of construction on the 3rd of January 1870. This condition, first called "caisson disease" by the project physician Andrew Smith, afflicted many of the workers working within the caissons. After Roebling's debilitating condition left him unable to physically supervise the construction firsthand, his wife Emily Warren Roebling stepped in and provided the critical written link between her husband and the engineers on site. Under her husband's guidance, Emily had studied higher mathematics, the calculations of catenary curves, the strengths of materials, bridge specifications and the intricacies of cable construction. She spent the next eleven years assisting Washington Roebling helping to supervise the bridge's construction. When iron probes underneath the caisson found the bedrock to be even deeper than expected, Roebling halted construction due to the increased risk of decompression sickness. He later deemed the aggregate overlying the bedrock thirty feet below it to be firm enough to support the tower base and construction continued. The
Brooklyn Bridge was completed thirteen years later and was opened for use on the
24th of May 1883. The opening ceremony was attended by several thousand
people and many ships were present in the East Bay for the occasion. President
Chester
A. Arthur and
New
York Mayor
Franklin
Edson crossed
the bridge to celebratory cannon fire and were greeted by Brooklyn Mayor
Seth
Low when they
reached the Brooklyn-side tower. Arthur shook hands with Washington Roebling at
the latter's home, after the ceremony. Roebling was unable to attend the
ceremony (and in fact rarely visited the site again), but held a banquet at
his house on the day of the bridge opening. Further festivity included the
performance of a band, gunfire from ships and a fireworks
display. On that
first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed what was then
the only land passage between Manhattan and Brooklyn. Emily Warren Roebling was
the first to cross the bridge. The bridge's main span over the East River is
1,595 feet 6 inches. The bridge cost $15.5 million to build and
approximately 27 people died during its construction. One week after the opening, on the 30th of May 1883, a rumour that the Bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede, which crushed and killed at least twelve people. On the 17th of May 1884, P. T. Barnum helped to squelch doubts about the bridge's stability - while publicising his famous circus - when one of his most famous attractions, Jumbo, led a parade of 21 elephants over the Brooklyn Bridge. At the
time it opened, and for several years, it was the longest suspension bridge in
the world - 50% longer than any previously built - and it has become a
treasured landmark. Since the 1980's, it has been floodlit at night to highlight
its architectural features. The towers are built of limestone, granite, and
Rosendale
cement. Their
architectural style is neo-Gothic, with
characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers.
The paint scheme of the bridge is "Brooklyn Bridge Tan" and "Silver", although
it has been argued that the original paint was "Rawlins
Red". At the
time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge
building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind
tunnels until the
1950’s - well after the collapse of the original Tacoma
Narrows Bridge
(Galloping Gertie) in 1940. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss
structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic
problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as
strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is
still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished
into history and been replaced. This is also in spite of the substitution of
inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J.
Lloyd Haigh - by the
time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already
been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the
bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually
allowed to stand, with the addition of 250 cables. Diagonal cables were
installed from the towers to the deck, intended to stiffen the bridge. They
turned out to be unnecessary, but were kept for their distinctive
beauty. After the collapse in 2007 of the I-35W highway bridge in the city of Minneapolis, increased public attention has been brought to bear on the condition of bridges across the US, and it has been reported that the Brooklyn Bridge approach ramps received a rating of "poor" at its last inspection. According to a NYC Department of Transportation spokesman, "The poor rating it received does not mean it is unsafe. Poor means there are some components that have to be rehabilitated." A $725 million project to replace the approaches and repaint the bridge was scheduled to begin in 2009. The
construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is detailed in the 1978 book The Great
Bridge by David
McCullough and
Brooklyn
Bridge (1981),
the first PBS
documentary film ever made by Ken
Burns. Burns
drew heavily on McCullough's book for the film and used him as narrator. It is
also described in Seven
Wonders of the Industrial World, a BBC
docudrama series with accompanying book. At various
times, the bridge has carried horse-drawn and trolley traffic; at present, it
has six lanes for motor vehicles, with a separate walkway along the centerline
for pedestrians and
bicycles. Due to
the roadway's height (11 feet posted) and weight (6,000 lb) posted)
restrictions, commercial vehicles and buses are prohibited from using this
bridge. The two inside traffic lanes once carried elevated
trains of the
BMT from
Brooklyn points to
a terminal at Park
Row via
Sands
Street.
Streetcars ran on
what are now the two center lanes (shared with other traffic) until the elevated
lines stopped using the bridge in 1944, when they moved to the protected center
tracks. In 1950 the
streetcars also stopped running, and the bridge was rebuilt to carry six lanes
of automobile traffic. The Brooklyn Bridge is accessible from the Brooklyn entrances of Tillary/Adams Streets, Sands/Pearl Streets, and Exit 28B of the eastbound Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. In Manhattan, motor cars can enter from either direction of the FDR Drive, Park Row, Chambers/Centre Streets, and Pearl/Frankfort Streets. Pedestrian access to the bridge from the Brooklyn side is from either Tillary/Adams Streets (in between the auto entrance/exit), or a staircase on Prospect St between Cadman Plaza East and West. In Manhattan, the pedestrian walkway is accessible from the end of Centre Street, or through the unpaid south staircase of Brooklyn Bridge-City Hall IRT subway station. The
Brooklyn Bridge has a wide pedestrian walkway open to walkers and cyclists, in
the center of the bridge and higher than the automobile lanes. While the bridge
has always permitted the passage of pedestrians across its span, its role in
allowing thousands to cross takes on a special importance in times of difficulty
when usual means of crossing the East River have become
unavailable. During
transit strikes by the
Transport
Workers Union in
1980 and
2005, the
bridge was used by people commuting to work, with Mayors Koch and
Bloomberg crossing
the bridge as a gesture to the affected public. Following
the 1965,
1977 and
2003
blackouts and most
famously after the 9/11 on the World
Trade Centre, the
bridge was used by people in Manhattan to leave the city after subway service
was suspended. The massive numbers of people on the bridge could not have been
anticipated by the original designer, yet John Roebling designed it with three
separate systems managing even unanticipated structural stresses. The bridge has
a suspension system, a diagonal stay system, and a stiffening truss. "Roebling
himself famously said if anything happens to one of (his) systems, 'The bridge
may sag, but it will not fall.'" The movement of large numbers of people on a
bridge creates pedestrian oscillations or "sway" as the crowd lifts one foot
after another, some falling inevitably in synchronized cadences. The natural
sway motion of people walking causes small sideways oscillations in a bridge,
which in turn cause people on the bridge to sway in step, increasing the
amplitude of the bridge oscillations and continually reinforcing the effect.
High-density traffic of this nature causes a bridge to appear to move
erratically or "to wobble" as happened at opening of the London
Millennium Footbridge in 2000.
First
jumper: The first
person to jump from the bridge was Robert E. Odlum on May 19, 1885. He struck
the water at an angle and died shortly thereafter from internal injuries.
Steve
Brodie was the
most famous jumper, or self-proclaimed jumper (in 1886).
Bungee jump: On June 1993, following 13 reconnoiters inside the metal structure, and with the help of a mountain guide, Thierry Devaux performed (illegally) eight acrobatic bungee jumps above the East River close to the Brooklyn pier, in the early morning. He used an electric winch between each acrobatic figure.
Brooklyn Bridge shooting: On the 1st of March 1994,
Lebanese-born Rashid
Baz opened
fire on a van carrying members of the Chabad-Lubavitch
Orthodox
Jewish Movement,
striking 16-year-old student Ari
Halberstam and three
others traveling on the bridge. Halberstam died five days later from his wounds.
Baz was apparently acting out of revenge for the Hebron
massacre of 29
Muslims by Baruch
Goldstein that had
taken place days earlier on the 25th of February 1994. Baz was convicted of
murder and sentenced to a 141-year prison term. After initially classifying the
murder as one committed out of road
rage, the
Justice
Department
reclassified the case in 2000 as a terrorist attack. The entrance ramp to the
bridge on the Manhattan side was named the Ari Halberstam Memorial Ramp in
memory of the victim.
2003
plot: In 2003,
truck driver Iyman
Faris was
sentenced to about 20 years in prison for providing material support to
Al-Qaeda, after an
earlier plot to destroy the bridge by cutting through its support wires with
blowtorches was
thwarted through information the National
Security Agency uncovered
through wiretapped phone conversations and interrogation of Al-Qaeda
militants.
2006
bunker discovery: In 2006, a
Cold
War era
bunker was found by city workers near the East River shoreline of Manhattan's
Lower East Side. The bunker, hidden within the masonry anchorage, still
contained the emergency supplies that were being stored for a potential nuclear
attack by the Soviet
Union.
100th
anniversary celebrations: The
centenary
celebrations on the 24th of May 1983, saw a cavalcade of cars crossing the
bridge, led by President Ronald
Reagan. A
flotilla of ships visited the harbor, parades were held, and in the evening the
sky over the bridge was illuminated by Grucci
Fireworks. The
Brooklyn
Museum exhibited
a selection of the original drawings made for the bridge's construction, some by
Washington Roebling himself.
125th
anniversary celebrations: Beginning
on the 22nd of May 2008, festivities were held over a five-day period to
celebrate the 125th anniversary of the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. The
events kicked off with a live performance of the Brooklyn
Philharmonic in
Empire
- Fulton Ferry State Park, followed
by special lighting of the bridge's towers and a fireworks display. Other events
held during the 125th anniversary celebrations, which coincided with the
Memorial
Day weekend,
included a film series, historical walking tours, information tents, a series of
lectures and readings, a bicycle tour of Brooklyn, a miniature golf course
featuring Brooklyn icons, and other musical and dance performances.
Just before the anniversary celebrations, the Telectroscope, which created a video link between New York and London, was installed on the Brooklyn side of the bridge. The installation lasted for a few weeks and permitted viewers in New York to see people looking into a matching telectroscope in front of London's Tower Bridge. A newly renovated pedestrian connection to DUMBO was also unveiled before the anniversary celebrations.
Cultural significance: It has been shown in films such as Once Upon A Time In America, Captive Women, The Fifth Element, Deep Impact, Godzilla, Aftershock: Earthquake in New York, I Am Legend, Life After People, Cloverfield, Zombi 2, Oliver & Company, Enchanted and Kate & Leopold. We went over the river on the subway and saw the bridge next to us, we went under it on our three hour Circle Line cruise around Long Island. By bus we went up to it on our night tour and went over it on our Brooklyn tour.
ALL IN ALL SO GOOD TO ACTUALLY SEE IT, GO OVER IT AND MARVEL AT IT
THE PIERS AND RIVER FLOW WERE VERY
IMPRESSIVE |