Across a Roebling Bridge

In order to strengthen our class bond (I think) the whole of the Junior class chartered a bus into Manhattan to go across the Brooklyn Bridge, a wonder of 19th century engineering.  Arthur Miller spoke very highly of it in a quote that I cannot find but that our tour guide read to us at the beginning of our walk.

We began our tour near the Woolworth Building and the Tweed Court House.  The Woolworth Building (top) was built in 1913 in the Gothic Style and is really quite pretty; it was the tallest building around for a while but not anymore.  The Tweed Court House was built in the 1870s for $13 million.  Hooray for Tammany Hall corruption!  Nearby is Park Row, famous for the fact that it is lined by the headquarters of the major newspapers of NYC.  At the time it was conveniently located near City Hall (still standing) for political dispatches and the neighborhood known as Five Points (now not slums) for easy access to scandals and murders, which as we all know are the stuff that really sell newspapers.

From there we proceeded to the Bridge itself, a wonder of technology.  I can't tell the full story here so I will recommend you read the chapter on building the bridge in David McCullough's Brave Companions because it really outlines how the bridge went up and the trials that the Roeblings faced.  You have to imagine an imposing Gothic structure rising 275 ft. above the East River and spanned 1300 ft. surrounded by buildings that were at maximum six stories to get the full impression of a truly elegant bridge.  The whole thing cost $15.5 million and about 36 people died building the thing including the man contracted to engineer the bridge: John A. Roebling.  He died surveying some land for one of the towers when his foot got caught between a boat and the pier and he got tetanus.  His job then passed to his son, Washington Roebling (aka "the Colonel"), who had been an engineer in the Union Army who, luckily, specialised in suspension bridges.  He was a very hands on leader, often going down into the caissons himself to inspect the work.  It is this practice that caused him to get the bends (then called caisson's disease) and consigned him to watch the construction from his Brooklyn Heights home.  He continued to lead the process through his wife who, by the end, became such an integral part of the process that she was granted the privilege of being the first person to walk across the newly completed bridge.  Even as a native New Yorker this was not a walk I had taken until now, but it is one I would recommend.  It was really cool to walk across the bridge, though I'm sure not as cool as it must have been for the first people to cross the bridge in the 1870s.  Until you get a chance to make the walk, please enjoy some pictures...

On a different, shorter note, Brooklyn was a centre of the Abolitionist Movement, which is pretty cool. The Plymouth Church of the Pilgrim especially.  This was the home of Henry Ward Beecher (brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe) who was an incendiary preacher who drew ferries full of people from Manhattan to hear him preach.  He was well known for holding slave auctions in which he did not sell men and women into bondage but into freedom.  With these auctions he would raise money to buy men and women out of slavery and use the leftover cash, if there was any, to set them up in a farm up north so that they could provide for themselves in the future.  


I snapped a couple pictures from around Brooklyn as well which are below.  Please enjoy!  Interestingly, the last picture is of Truman Capote's apartment (the one in which he lived as he wrote In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's) so that's pretty awesome.