May 24, 1883: Brooklyn Bridge Opens

1883: After 13 years of construction, the Brooklyn Bridge opens. It’s the first suspension bridge to use steel — rather than iron — cables, and the first bridge across the East River. Today it remains both an important traffic link and an iconic image of New York City. Conceived in 1867 by famed bridge designer […]

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1883: After 13 years of construction, the Brooklyn Bridge opens. It's the first suspension bridge to use steel -- rather than iron -- cables, and the first bridge across the East River. Today it remains both an important traffic link and an iconic image of New York City.

Conceived in 1867 by famed bridge designer John Augustus Roebling, it was by far the world's longest suspension bridge, with a deck that connected Manhattan and Brooklyn suspended by cables hung from two neo-Gothic towers that pierced the skyline. Anticipating "The Worst That Could Happen" and not precisely certain of the strength of his materials, Roebling designed the bridge to be six times stronger than it had to be.

As a fail-safe, he added straight, diagonal cables to stiffen the superstructure. They make the bridge not a true suspension bridge (with vertical stringers, or "suspender" cables, hanging from huge, curved catenary cables), but a hybrid of suspension and cable-stayed design. That hybrid also gives the steel web work its characteristic -- and mesmerizing -- crisscross appearance.

In addition to the East River, the bridge spanned two generations of the Roebling family, as John died of tetanus in 1869 after an injury sustained while surveying the prospective site of the bridge. John's son Washington assumed the title of chief engineer, but tragedy struck again when he became ill with "caisson disease" (severe decompression sickness, aka the bends) after rapidly exiting one of the bridge's caissons.

With John Roebling dead and his son incapacitated, it fell to Washington's wife, Emily Warren Roebling to supervise construction of the bridge. Though never formally trained, Emily had studied alongside her husband and began her own research after Washington became bedridden.

In The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge, historian David McCullough credits Emily Roebling with saving the project:

By and by it was common gossip that hers was the great mind behind the great work and that this, the most monumental engineering triumph of the age, was actually the doing of a woman, which as a general proposition was taken in some quarters to be both preposterous and calamitous. In truth, she had by then a thorough grasp of the engineering involved.

Emily rode alongside President Chester Arthur during the ceremonial opening of the bridge. Later, the Brooklyn Bridge carried P.T. Barnum's elephants, light rail and six lanes of automotive traffic, as well as thousands of pedestrians leaving Lower Manhattan after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The New York City Department of Transportation began a four-year, $500 million renovation of the bridge earlier this year.

But it's not for sale, no matter what that guy on the corner tells you.

Source: Various

Photo: rickberk/Flickr

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