23
And yet the bridge is beautiful in itself.
—Scientific American
IN THE early spring of 1883, about the time the weather had turned warm enough for the Chief Engineer to spend some time outdoors in the garden, the bridge was finished. There was no one moment, no particular day, when he could have said as much, nor would there be. Bridges did not end that way. There was always something more to finish up, some last detail to attend to. The final touches at Cincinnati, for example, had dragged on for nearly six months after the opening ceremonies and it looked as though the same might happen here. But the bridge he saw standing now against the sky half a mile in the distance was the finished bridge for all intents and purposes. In another few weeks it would be open and in use.
It had taken fourteen years. In another few weeks he would be forty-six years old. He had spent nearly a third of his life on this one bridge, nearly as much time as his father had given to all his major bridges combined.
His health was much improved. The nearer the end came the better he felt. He could get about the house much more easily than before or go out into the garden. His eyesight had returned. It was a little as though he himself had returned from a long absence. He could read the papers again, for one thing—about General George Crook chasing Apaches across the border into Mexico that spring or about the housewarming party given by Mrs. William Vanderbilt at her limestone palace on Fifth Avenue, the most lavish and costly fancy-dress ball ever put on in the United States (an estimated $250,000) and reputedly the greatest social event of the age. According to the Times the costume problem alone “disturbed the sleep and occupied the waking hours of social butterflies, both male and female, for over six weeks.” Abram Hewitt came as King Lear, “while yet in his right mind,” the paper noted, a remark that doubtless cheered Washington Roebling.
In the time he had spent on the bridge, the telephone and the electric light had been introduced. (What a difference they would have made during the work inside the caissons.) Now at night he could see hundreds of electric lights burning over in New York, directly across the river, in the blocks Edison had first lit the summer before, when Roebling was at Newport.
Instead of one transcontinental railroad, there were now four and a fifth was under construction. There were ten million more people in the country than there had been in 1869. (Brooklyn had grown by 180,000; New York by more than 200,000.) The buffalo had been all but exterminated on the Great Plains and Chester A. Arthur had installed modern plumbing in the White House. Robert E. Lee was dead. Horace Greeley, Jesse James, Brigham Young, Emerson, Crazy Horse, Peter Cooper, they were all dead now. A whole era had passed. His own son would be entering RPI in the fall.
The bridge had taken nearly three times as long as his father had said it would and it had cost $15 million, which was more than twice what his father had estimated. It had taken the lives of twenty men, not including his own father. * The price he himself had paid was long since past reckoning.
Henry Slocum had failed to become governor, because of the bridge mainly. Now Henry Murphy, too, was under the ground at Greenwood.
Would they all have gone ahead with it anyway back in 1869 had they known what was involved? It was a question neither Washington Roebling nor anyone else would ever be able to answer.
When the Democratic state convention opened in Syracuse late the previous September, it had been obvious that the nomination for governor was going to be worth a very great deal. A few days before, in Saratoga, the Republicans had picked a lackluster candidate named Charles Folger, who was generally taken to be what he was—a stooge for President Arthur and the infamous Jay Gould. Not even the Republican faithful had been able to get very enthusiastic about Folger. So in Syracuse, as the Democrats gathered inside the Grand Opera House, spirits were running high and especially among the Kings County delegation, for it had looked even to impartial observers as though General Henry Slocum would be the party’s choice. But instead the convention had picked an unknown upstate lawyer, the reform mayor of Buffalo, Grover Cleveland, who had been considered strictly a local candidate before the balloting began.
Slocum’s only serious rival had been Roswell P. Flower, a debonair Congressman from Watertown who had made a fortune on Wall Street and who, like Folger, was handicapped by his friendship with Jay Gould, as well as by a bad lisp that was sometimes linked unkindly with his name. But just as the convention was about to open, the World, then owned by Gould, began a series of sensational articles on the “Bridge Frauds.” The Tweed disclosures were published in full still one more time, as though they were all new history. Every prior example of corruption within the Bridge Company, documented or alleged, was assembled into a massive attack on the Brooklyn men who had been behind the project. It was charged that three million dollars had been stolen outright during the early years of the work, that Kingsley and Stranahan were little better than common crooks, but, unlike Tweed, so skillful at covering their tracks that proof of their guilt would be next to impossible to come by. Once again Henry Murphy was asked for a statement and once again he denied the charges, as did Stranahan. Kingsley refused to see reporters. Only Thomas Kinsella was willing to talk and he said the fanfare was nothing more than politics.
“I consider it a very bold movement on the part of Jay Gould to get control of the Democratic party, just as he has already got control of the Republican party,” Kinsella said. “In my opinion it is all politics and very bad politics, too. It is as transparent as glass, and anybody can easily see through it. Kingsley, one of the men attacked, is quite likely to appear as a delegate to the Syracuse convention, while General Slocum, one of the trustees, is the man who will undoubtedly be placed in antagonism with Congressman Flower for the nomination for governor. The object, it appears to me, is to cast odium on these men, and break them down in advance of the convention.” Kingsley was not only a delegate, he led the Kings County delegation, solidly committed to Slocum, and Kinsella would be the one to deliver the speech putting Slocum’s name before the convention.
The great issue at first had been the seating of the Tammany delegates, supposedly representing 45,000 voters and headed by that old enemy of the bridge, “Honest John” Kelly. Until late the night before the balloting was to begin, it had looked as though the Tammany delegates would not be let in. But then some of Kelly’s people came calling on the Kings County Democrats to beg for their support. The meeting lasted far into the night, when Kingsley at last agreed to go to work for Kelly. As a result the Tammany delegates were seated and Slocum’s backers went into the convention confident Slocum would get the nomination on the second ballot.
But a man named Ira Shafer, a Flower supporter, gave a speech referring at some length to Slocum’s connection with the bridge and its “gross frauds,” and this, on top of the World “disclosures,” was, as the Times reported, “the means of frightening many of the country delegates who were friendly to General Slocum, but feared the effect his association with the original promoters of the bridge enterprise might have…”
Slocum was also strongly opposed by an influential reform faction from New York City known as the County Democracy, the head of which was none other than Abram S. Hewitt.
As a result Slocum and Flower were deadlocked on the first ballot. Kelly had not delivered for Slocum, but split his votes, biding his time. The Brooklyn men felt they had been double-crossed. There was a fierce scramble to pick up votes but on the second ballot Slocum and Flower were deadlocked again. But this time Hewitt and Kelly had both gone for Cleveland and that decided it. The Flower delegates immediately abandoned their man and Cleveland won on the third ballot. As a consolation prize, Slocum was later nominated for Congressman-at-Large.
William Kingsley and his delegation returned to Brooklyn bitterly disappointed and talking freely with reporters of their disgust with Kelly, who, as they said, would never have been seated in the first place had it not been for their help. Kelly answered later that he himself had never said a word about supporting Slocum, which was quite true.
In November Cleveland defeated the Republican Folger by the largest majority ever given a candidate for governor. Slocum was elected to Congress, but among Brooklyn Democrats there were wistful reflections on what might have been. In an inverse way the bridge had made the Buffalo man governor.
Once the elections were over, the papers had little more to say about bridge frauds. The clamor over corruption ceased instantly. But on November 20, determined to settle the issue once and for all, Mayors Low and Grace, with the approval of the trustees, appointed two accountants to examine fully all receipts, vouchers, papers, payrolls, and all other documents connected with the bridge, “and especially to investigate the books and papers of the Bridge as they bear upon the charges made by the New York Worldand others against the Trustees.” It would be a year before their findings would be made public, and they would cause no stir whatever. There were vouchers on file, the accountants reported, for total expenditures of $15,211,982.92. Due to certain clerical errors overpayments to contractors came to $9,578.67 and those were the only discrepancies found in the company’s books, all of which had been “honestly and neatly kept.”
As it happened, and as no one realized at the time, November 20 was also Henry Murphy’s last day at the Bridge Company. That night he came down with a bad cold. On Friday, December 1, 1882, he was dead.
As the papers reported, Murphy, at age seventy-two, had been in good health up until the night he took sick. As regular as clockwork he had left his house each morning at nine and walked to his law offices on Court Street, where he and his two old partners, Lott and Vanderbilt, both dead now, had long been such fixtures. Later in the morning he would go over to Montague Street to the Coney Island Railroad offices, stay perhaps an hour, then walk down to the Bridge Company, where he generally spent the remainder of the day. On the 20th he had gone home about five.
His cold had turned to pneumonia a day or so later, but it was his heart that killed him, according to the papers, and from what his son said in an interview, it seems he died in terrible agony. The time of death was six in the morning.
“At the clubs and other places where men gathered, the deceased was the general topic of conversation,” wrote the Eagle, the paper he had founded. The feeling was that the day marked the end of an era. Murphy had been a historic figure, everyone felt. He was the closest thing to a Founding Father Brooklyn ever had, both in his personal grace and in the things he had accomplished. To many he had seemed a last holdover from a vanished golden age. His passing was like the tolling of a bell, as almost everyone who wrote about it tried to express in one way or other.
The bridge trustees called a special meeting and with Kingsley presiding, sitting in Murphy’s old chair, a long formal statement of grief was drawn up, saying, among other things, that the bridge would remain a memorial to Henry Cruse Murphy.
The major things still to be seen to by mid-May were these: the electric lights were not yet fully installed; the big iron terminal buildings at either end of the bridge were nowhere near ready; and it would be September at least before the bridge trains would begin running between the terminals. But there were no more specifications to get up, no more contracts to sign, and everything was being handled with the greatest dispatch by Roebling’s immensely capable assistants. Amazingly, they were all still on the job, after fourteen years, even Collingwood, who had signed up originally for a month only. Except for Farrington, not one, in all that time, had quit out of discouragement or frustration or to take a better-paying position, several of which had been offered. Not one had been relieved of his job. Roebling’s own sense of duty and determination had been matched in kind. Every man he had hired had proved up to the work. For some, such as McNulty, it was the only work they had ever known.
The bridge itself looked now about as it did in the drawing Hildenbrand had done for the Centennial Exhibition, except that there were no crowning capstones on the towers, as John Roebling had wanted, and there never would be because of cost. The towers, of course, had been standing there for nearly seven years now and were an accepted part of the landscape. But with the last of the timber falsework removed from inside the archways, they looked now as they were supposed to, like colossal Gothic gateways to the two cities.
But it was the finished span between them that made the towers seem so much more important and purposeful than ever before. It was the finished roadway, arching slowly, gracefully upward over the river to meet at the center with the great downward swoop of the cables, that made it a suspension bridge at last—and the greatest on earth. And finally, now, the diagonal stays were in place, hundreds of them, radiating down from the tower tops, angling across the vertical harp-string pattern of the suspenders, and forming what, at close range, looked like a powerful steel net, or, from a distance, as Roebling saw it, like a vast, finespun web. The bridge now, as never before, was a thrilling thing to see.
More even than the other modern structures people flocked to gape at in New York, the bridge could look extremely different at different times of day, and depending on one’s vantage point. From the narrow, low-lying streets on the New York side, for example, one got relatively little sense of its long reach over the river, or what it might be reaching out to. The impression, instead, was one of fantastic upward magnitude, of breath-taking elevation, the tower in the foreground and the roadway it carried within its arches upstaging whatever else the bridge might be achieving beyond the tower.
The very shabbiness and stunted scale of the old neighborhood beneath the tower worked to the advantage of the bridge, which by contrast seemed an embodiment of the noblest aspirations, majestic, heaven-directed, lifting into the light above the racket, the shabbiness, and the confusion of the waterfront, the way a great cathedral rises over the hovels of the faithful. And the twin archways in the tower, seen from street level, looked like vast vacant windows to the sky. For a child seeing it at night, the tower could have been the dark and mighty work of medieval giants. Where on earth could one see so many stars framed in granite?
The roadway to the tower was finished now but was still closed off at Chatham Street by a high board fence plastered thick with theater posters and handbills. And along the roadway unsightly heaps of rubbish stood waiting to be carted off. Even so, there was nothing in the average person’s experience to compare to this spacious, beckoning, empty thoroughfare. It climbed up and out of the city like something seen in dreams. It was a highway people just naturally wanted to travel, even if they had no interest in the smaller, more sedate city they knew to be at the other end. To the New Yorker who lived within its shadow, it was not just a bridge to Brooklyn—few New Yorkers had any special desire to go to Brooklyn—it was a highway into the open air. When the day came when everyone could go out on it, when people by the tens of thousands could go up that road and through those colossal arches, they would go, they knew, not to Brooklyn, but to a place where sailing ships would glide like toys beneath their feet, where they could look down on the tallest buildings and their own mean, narrow streets and the people in them, where they could gaze out over land and water and everything man-made. “What a relief it will be from the ill-smelling streets and stuffy shops,” one man wrote. “What a happy escape from those dreadful cabins on the ferryboats! What a grand place to stretch your legs of a bright winter’s day after toiling through the streets! To go from shore to shore in one straight and jolly tramp, with the sky for a roof and the breeze for good company.”
Even before the bridge was opened it had become a symbol of something impossible to define that made New York different from every other city on earth. The bridge dominated the imagination the way it dominated the skyline, as Al Smith would say when reminiscing about his boyhood.
The view from the water, from the deck of a passing ferry or excursion steamer, a view being enjoyed daily by many thousands, was, of course, very different still. From there the elaborate and extremely interesting steel understructure was plainly visible overhead. From there, for example, one could see the wind braces Roebling had put in, something that would be hidden from the view of travelers on the bridge itself. These were cable stays designed to prevent horizontal vibrations. They were anchored to the corners of the towers, beneath the deck of the bridge, and extended diagonally under the deck to attach to the opposite side. The longest of them reached a third of the way across the central span and there were similar braces on the land spans.
But it was the over-all arc of the entire bridge that impressed people most when they saw it from the river, and again it seemed somehow above and beyond ordinary experience. Even the most so-phisticated and analytical observers felt this. An editor from Scientific American wrote, “…the bridge is a marvel of beauty viewed from the level of the river. In looking at its vast stretch, not only over the river between the towers, but over the inhabited, busy city shore, it appears to have a character of its own far above the drudgeries and exactions of the lower business levels.”
Still, the finest view of all, perhaps, was from Brooklyn Heights. Visually the bridge belonged to the Heights as it did to no other point on land.
The bridge was just far enough distant and the elevation of the Heights such that the scale of everything seemed more manageable. The towers did not loom up all out of proportion as they did from the streets of New York. There was little foreshortening of the great span. Moreover, the other essential components—the cables, suspenders, trusswork along the deck, the anchorages—could be plainly seen and in proper perspective, their function and relationship to the rest of the bridge being neither concealed nor distorted. Were one to draw a picture to explain how the bridge worked, about the easiest, clearest way would be to show it as it looked from the rear window of a house on Columbia Heights in the spring of 1883, when there was nothing on the Brooklyn side blocking the view and the skyline of Manhattan was, by later standards, quite restrained.
From the Heights it was perfectly clear why the bridge had been built. Its practicality, no less than its grandeur, was unmistakable. There below was the sparkling river and there beyond was New York, stretched out before the eye like an enormous scale model. The bridge was the way to get there. It was the great highway to New York, just as had been intended from the start. And while Brooklyn in the mind of the average New Yorker might remain an indeterminable, even dubious, destination, for everyone living in Brooklyn, New York was a known quantity and the reasons for wishing to get there—and to get back again—were quite clear.
The river now looked very different than it had in the early days of the work. Traffic was heavier, it moved faster, and there was a good deal more coal smoke trailing in the wind. The river was change itself—ships coming and going, sails turning in the sun, cloud shadows crossing over from New Jersey, gulls circling and diving, the water changing color with the sky, the other shore now very near, now distant, depending on the light or atmospheric conditions, the tides running. But over it all, triumphant and immovable, stood the bridge, seeming to hold the land in place against all change. On the one hand it was a vaulting avenue over the river, defying space and gravity like some weightless natural phenomenon (“…high over all the Great Bridge swept across the sky,” a novelist would write), but it was also fixed, deep-rooted. It was as though the two cities might drift apart were the bridge not there. The bridge kept things in place. It belonged.
There were some, of course, who for the rest of their lives would see the bridge in other ways. For them it would be an emblem of colossal greed and deception, of hideous physical torture and unbearable grief. There were people on both sides of the river who would look at its commanding silhouette and see the faces of Tweed, “Brains” Sweeny, and the rest, leering, with black eyes full of sly deception, as Nast had drawn them. There were those who would follow with their eye the path of the great cables in the sunshine (“…the arching path/ Upward, veering with light, the flight of strings of wires,…telepathy,” the poet Hart Crane would write) and think only of the bad steel woven into them forever. And there were those, in tenements back from the river, for whom the lofty towers would remain a day in summer when the broken corpse of a husband or father was brought to the door in a spring wagon.
The only major parts of the bridge that Roebling could not see from his house were the two terminal buildings and once, in late April, he had been taken by carriage to have a first look at the one in Brooklyn that McNulty had designed. The big, curved two-story building, which was to be twice the size of the station at the other end, was little more than half built then. Still it had looked most impressive, even on dingy Sands Street, where the main entrance was to be and where Roebling’s carriage stopped. A reporter who visited the New York terminal about the same time wrote of “an almost deafening din of a hundred workmen hammering away for dear life.” In Brooklyn the noise must have been twice as bad.
From here, on the upper level, the bridge trains would leave for New York. The commuter would pay his fare at one of several ornamental iron toll booths (“pretty enough for opera boxes”), then climb a broad iron stairway to the waiting platforms. The cavernous building itself, as was already apparent, was to be an extremely ornate affair, like the elevated railroad stations in New York, with all kinds of fancy ironwork, panels, pillars, molding, and row on row of plate-glass windows. Once finished, the whole building was to be painted a dark red.
The bridge trains would be much like the newest cars on New York’s elevated trains. They would have large windows, double sliding doors, open platforms in front and back, and they would appear to be self-propelled, unless one were to look between the tracks and see the steel traction cable they hooked on to. (At the time Roebling paid his visit to Sands Street, workmen were installing the two 300-horsepower horizontal steam engines that would supply the power for the cable. The engines were located beneath the Brooklyn approach, but their boilerhouse, at Washington and Prospect, with its very conspicuous smokestack, was one of the other changes brought to the neighborhood by the bridge.)
The trip across on the bridge train was to take five minutes, as John Roebling had said it would, and the fare would be five cents. A horse and rider using the roadway would also pay five cents, a horse and vehicle ten cents. The charge for cattle would be five cents each, sheep and hogs two cents. Anyone wishing to walk over by the elevated promenade would have to pay a penny, although there was a movement in Albany, started by William Kingsley, to make the bridge free to pedestrians.
Roebling did not get out of his carriage the day he came to inspect the Brooklyn terminal. After he had seen enough he was driven home again. So not once in all fourteen years did he ever set foot on the bridge.
The terminal buildings were among the several things he had had to occupy his mind during these final months, and like the electric lights or the iron railings for the promenade or the plans for the opening celebration—all things that would have seemed very much after the fact, trivial even, in times past—he gave them his full attention, concerned over every last detail, as always, the totally disciplined professional to the very end.
A contract for lighting the bridge with seventy electric arc lamps had been awarded to the United States Illuminating Company, as he had recommended. The cost was to be eighteen thousand dollars, which was several thousand less than what the Edison Company had bid for doing the job with incandescent lamps. But cost had not been the deciding factor. Roebling had concluded that the sputtering blue-white arc lamps would be superior to the Edison type for lighting large areas. *
The dynamos to furnish power for the lamps were set up in the engine room of the Brooklyn terminal. A reporter who visited this generating station as it was about to be put into service gave the following description:
The scene suggested the subterranean laboratory of a magician. Blue lights burned, invisible engines shook the ground with ponderous stroke, and a dozen grim and anxious men toiled in the ghastly glare. Around these perspiring men stood two or three directors, giving orders and hastening the work. Great belts, a yard wide, ran over dynamo pulleys at a frightful speed, and eight or ten other pulleys were awaiting new belts which were hanging slack over their shafting.
It was as though the monstrous bridge was about to be jolted to life by a sudden massive charge from this eerie laboratory, like the creature in Mrs. Shelley’s story of Dr. Frankenstein.
The lamps themselves were being mounted on posts set on top of the steel trusswork, beside the promenade, at intervals of about one hundred feet. When the night came to turn them on, it would mark the first use of electric light over a river.
As before, Emily was serving as her husband’s principal contact with the work. She was still going to the bridge regularly, and some days two and three times. There were the usual messages to deliver, answers to bring back, and things he had asked her to keep an eye out for. Once when a manufacturer had been puzzled as to how a particular part of the superstructure should be formed and had come to the Roebling house to get some questions answered, she had made a drawing to show how it could be done, carefully explaining each step. Now she could see to its proper installation as well, and any doubts there may have been among the men about her ability to pass judgment on such matters had long since vanished.
Then in early May, when the last of the superstructure was in place, the roadway at last completed, and the time had come to send a carriage across—to test the effect of a trotting horse—Roebling had asked that she be the first person to ride over. The others on the staff and in the bridge offices agreed wholeheartedly. So one fine morning she and a coachman had crossed over from Brooklyn in a new victoria, its varnish gleaming in the sunshine. She had taken a live rooster along with her, as a symbol of victory, and from one end of the bridge to the other, the men had stopped their work to cheer and lift their hats as she came riding by.
Now, the week before the bridge was to be opened, Roebling had agreed to another interview. Apparently he and Emily had decided there was little damage that could be done at this late date, provided they kept the conversation brief and pleasant, and that is the way it went.
The man was from the Union, Brooklyn’s Republican paper, which had recently made the bridge the dominant pictorial element in its logotype. His name is not known, but he wrote later that this was the first time he had seen Roebling in eleven years.
Emily received him in the library. Colonel Roebling was resting in his room upstairs, she said. He had spent the morning sitting for a sculptor who was doing a bust for the opening ceremonies and he was feeling a little tired just now.
When the reporter inquired for the Colonel’s health, she told him not to be surprised if he found her husband looking a good deal healthier than he might expect. “He is not so sick as people imagine,” she said. “The difficulty with him is that it wearies him to talk for any extended time. Any unusual exertion is sure to be followed by prostration, and the effort of talking or listening for any extended time has a very debilitating effect.”
The reporter wanted to know if Colonel Roebling would be taking part in the grand opening. No, he would not, she said. The excitement would be too much for him. “After the ceremonial at Sands Street and the procession are over, we will receive our friends here,” she continued. “Colonel Roebling will take part in the reception as long as he can stand the strain…”
She handed him an engraved invitation, a large white card from Tiffany & Co. In the upper left-hand corner was a small portrait of Roebling, resting on a laurel branch. His name and professional title were on a scroll underneath. To the right of the portrait, extending across the top of the card, as though seen in the distance, was the bridge, “in perfect detail,” as the reporter noted. The invitation itself read as follows:
THE EAST RIVER BRIDGE
will be opened to the public
Thursday, May twenty-fourth, at 2 o’clock.
Col. & Mrs. Washington A. Roebling
request the honor of your company
after the opening ceremony until seven o’clock.
110 Columbia Heights
Brooklyn
R.s.v.p.
The reporter asked if Colonel Roebling was likely to undertake any other great work, now that the bridge was finished. According to the article he wrote later, “Mrs. Roebling elevated her brows and said decisively, ‘Oh, no. This is his last as well as his greatest work. He will need a long rest after this is over. He needs it and he has certainly earned it.’”
Then she excused herself to go upstairs to see if her husband was ready to receive him. When she returned, she asked if he would please follow her.
“The writer found the Chief Engineer of the greatest suspension bridge in the world walking about his room and wearing a light spring overcoat and a soft felt hat,” he wrote. On a side table he noted “an imposing array of medicine phials.” But Roebling did indeed look better than he had expected—much better. He had put on weight and was noticeably fuller in the face and his hair and beard were streaked with gray. He was much paler, too, than he had been, and when he came forward to shake hands, his step appeared “short and a little uncertain.” But to judge by appearances, time had not been altogether unkind to Roebling, the reporter decided. “Seen at a standstill or sitting in an easy chair, with one leg thrown over the back of another, no one would suppose that this robust-looking gentleman, with massive forehead, without a wrinkle, and keen gray eye that lights up wonderfully in conversation, was a victim to one of the most terrible diseases known to medical science.” It was only in the lines around the eyes, the reporter said, that Roebling’s face revealed any traces of past suffering.
The three of them sat down and the only thing serious touched on in the conversation that followed was the question of locomotives on the bridge, a subject about which there was still some curiosity in Brooklyn but little reliable information to go by.
“There will be no difficulty about running such locomotives as they use on the elevated railroad in New York across the bridge,” said Roebling, who seemed to be having no difficulty speaking. “It was built to sustain them, and there would not be a particle of risk in it.” If anyone wanted to transfer two or three passenger cars from a railroad in Brooklyn to one in New York, using a small locomotive, that too would be possible. The bridge had been built to sustain such weight. But he was still “unalterably opposed” to full-sized locomotives. The reporter wanted to know about Pullman cars.
“Oh, don’t say that you would not consent to Pullman cars,” Emily Roebling said. “You know you promised Mr. Stranahan that Pullman cars could go across.”
At which, according to the reporter, Roebling laughed and replied, “Do you know what Mr. Stranahan wants? He wants a Pullman car to go right up to his back yard. He wants to be able to step into it at his house, ride across the bridge and up to Saratoga without changing his seat. That’s what he wants.”
Then, according to the reporter’s account, Roebling suddenly began to look very tired. Perhaps he had said too much. “I congratulate you on the successful termination of your great work,” the reporter said, standing up to leave. “I suppose this will be the last of the kind you will undertake.”
“I don’t know,” Roebling answered. “If I get well there is lots of big work in the world to do yet.” And with that the interview ended.
Plans for the great occasion were now complete. According to all accounts it was to be the biggest celebration in New York since the opening of the Erie Canal. For Brooklyn, said the Times, it was certain to be “the greatest gala day in the history of that moral suburb.” It was to be known as “The People’s Day.”
Mayor Seth Low was the one chiefly behind the idea. He had proclaimed it an official holiday in Brooklyn. He would decorate and illuminate his own home, he said, and urged all his neighbors to do the same. He called on Brooklyn business establishments to close for the day and already most of them had sent out neatly printed cards saying they would. Schools would be out, most stores would be closed.
About thirteen thousand tickets from Tiffany had been issued by the trustees. Seven thousand of them, a pale-blue color and the size of a theater thicket, were good for admittance to the bridge on the opening day. The rest, large, stiff white cards with an engraved view of the bridge, were for the ceremonies to be held inside the Brooklyn terminal.
President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, and their parties were to walk over the bridge from New York, escorted by Mayor Franklin Edson, the Seventh Regiment, and a seventy-five piece band. They would be met on the bridge by an official delegation from Brooklyn and proceed to the Sands Street terminal for the formal ceremonies. James Stranahan would preside. William Kingsley, as acting president of the bridge trustees, would formally present the bridge to Mayors Edson and Low, each of whom was expected to make a few brief remarks. Then the “principal orations” of the day were to be delivered by two gentlemen selected as fitting representatives of their home cities, Abram Hewitt for New York and for Brooklyn the Reverend Dr. Storrs. After a private reception at the home of the Chief Engineer, there was to be a dinner for the President and the Governor down the street at the home of Mayor Low. A fireworks display at the bridge would begin at eight and would be followed by a public reception for the President at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
The North Atlantic Squadron—the Tennessee, Kearsarge, Saratoga, Yantic, and Vandalia—had been ordered to Brooklyn to take part in the celebration. The Minnesota had already arrived and was anchored off the Battery. Guns would be fired from the Navy Yard, from Governors Island, from the warships. A theatrical promoter, Commodore Joe Tooker, had chartered the mammoth excursion steamer Grand Republic and planned to steam up and down beneath the bridge and fire guns from his deck as well. “Bell-ringing, steam-whistling, and band-playing are among the incidental attractions offered the patrons of this boat,” the papers reported.
Brooklyn wharf owners were inviting select friends to spend the evening with them on their piers. Innumerable New York business firms with offices overlooking the river were inviting favorite customers to watch from their windows. Janitors in the tallest buildings on Printing House Square were overrun by applicants for admission to their roofs. All tenants in the Morse Building, at Nassau and Beekman Streets, had been told they could watch from the roof. The tops of the Temple Court Building on the opposite corner and the Mills Building nearby were also to be open. Richard K. Fox, the flamboyant proprietor of the Police Gazette, had sent out ten thousand invitations to watch the show from his new building on Franklin Square, thinking possibly several hundred recipients might appear.
Popular interest in all this was considerable, to say the least, and the press made much of it, including the New York World, which had changed hands just the month before. Jay Gould had sold the paper to young Joseph Pulitzer of St. Louis, and the new owner not only considered the Brooklyn Bridge a historic event, in the way the Eads bridge had been, but thought the World’s previous hostility to the mammoth new structure was just plain bad publishing. The World now loved the bridge.
Indeed, the only people who seemed displeased with the arrangements being made were some of the more militant Irish, who in mid-April had suddenly realized that the 24th happened also to be Queen Victoria’s birthday and so began angrily protesting the date selected. The Central Labor Union issued a statement calling on “all good men and women in both cities to remember this latest insult of the would-be aristocratic element in our midst.” The Tribune answered that “it would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to fix upon a day that did not commemorate something or other unpleasant for Ireland,” and as the appointed day drew nearer, there was talk of Irish fanatics, “Dynamite Patriots,” attempting to blow up the bridge.
The idea of a grand celebration did not much appeal to Washington Roebling either. Kingsley, too, Roebling understood, was of a like mind and had suggested to the trustees that once everything was in order they simply put up a sign saying “The Bridge Is Open.” But the other trustees had been against that, and Seth Low especially. As early as March a committee had been formed to make the arrangements.
When he heard later what was being planned, Roebling had grown extremely uneasy. If there were to be fireworks, he wrote to the trustees, then the bridge must be cleared of all spectators. If there were to be soldiers participating in parades on the main span, then they must not march in step. He was also concerned about how many people might be permitted onto the bridge once the ceremonies were over, and what the consequences might be if a mob ever got out of control.
People had been getting onto the bridge for several months now, despite the precautions taken to stop them. One evening in April a mob of boys from New York had broken through the barriers at Chatham Street, crossed over the bridge, and started hurling rocks down on the houses near the Brooklyn tower. Police converged on them from both ends of the bridge and the boys had shinnied up the suspenders and climbed down under the flooring. “The officers used their clubs in an effective manner,” according to a newspaper account the following morning, “and soon cleared the structure of the roughs.” But the whole incident was a very dangerous sign Roebling said.
There were other things he found annoying. He had been receiving inquiries, for example, from Abram Hewitt, who wanted help with his speech. In a letter written in early May (a letter in which Hewitt, or his secretary, misspelled Roebling’s name), Hewitt said he intended to take up “the social and political considerations involved in the creation of new avenues of transportation.” He wanted the engineer to send him “comparative examples of great engineering works, which would show that by scientific appliances the cost of the bridge is very much below what would be possible in any preceding age.” He wanted a table of wages from Roebling and other technical information. Hewitt planned to present the bridge as a symbol of progress.
But the builder of the bridge did not see it that way. Or perhaps he was in no mood to be of any assistance to Abram Hewitt. In any event, Roebling’s answer went as follows:
To build his pyramid Cheops packed some pounds of rice into the stomachs of innumerable Egyptians and Israelites. We today would pack some pounds of coal inside steam boilers to do the same thing, and this might be cited as an instance of the superiority of modern civilization over ancient brute force. But when referred to the sun, our true standard of reference, the comparison is naught, because to produce these few pounds of coal required a thousand times more solar energy than to produce the few pounds of rice. We are simply taking advantage of an accidental circumstance.
It took Cheops twenty years to build his pyramid, but if he had had a lot of Trustees, contractors, and newspaper reporters to worry him, he might not have finished it by that time. The advantages of modern engineering are in many ways over balanced by the disadvantages of modern civilization.
It was the sort of thing he had doubtless wished to say to Hewitt for quite some time and that he had somehow refrained from saying to the Union reporter. His concept of energy consumption was also well in advance of his time.
A week or so later Hewitt wrote again to ask for the names of all those men he ought to “particularize” in his oration and for a brief explanation of what their individual contributions had been. This request Roebling willingly answered.
For Emily it was as busy as any time since the bridge began. The reception would be all her doing. She had drawn up the guest list, decided on the design and wording of the invitation, commissioned the bust of her husband as well as an oil portrait, ordered flowers and bunting to decorate the house, planned her own entourage to attend the ceremonies, and did the best she could to protect her husband from any more last-minute nervous strain than was absolutely necessary. She was also making arrangements to vacate the house almost immediately after the reception. She had rented the house, starting in June. She, her son, and husband would return to Newport for the summer.
The reception had been her idea. If her husband could not participate in the day Seth Low and the others were planning, then she would bring them to him—the trustees, the mayors, the Governor, the President of the United States.
Her own party would ride in twenty-five carriages. She would be in the first of them, in the same victoria in which she had crossed the bridge. She would ride with her son, John A. Roebling, II. Following would be Ferdinand Roebling and his wife, Charles Roebling and his wife, Professor and Mrs. Methfessel, Emily’s brother William Warren from Washington, her sister-in-law Elvira Stewart, her sister, Mrs. Hook, and Eddie Roebling, now a twenty-eight-year-old bachelor living in New York. The rest were mostly personal friends.
“I wish you would make one of my party of ladies to attend the public ceremony of opening the big bridge,” she wrote to a Mrs. William G. Wilson of New York. “I want the ladies to meet at my house at one o’clock on Thursday and go in a procession down to the bridge—sort of opposition to the Presidential procession on the New York side you know!
“Wear short dresses and bonnet—as I shall even at the reception. I want you to help me receive after the public performance is over.”
The mail arriving at the house was full of notes of congratulations and grateful acceptances for the reception. On May 18 came still one more letter to Roebling from Abram Hewitt. To the Chief Engineer it must have seemed one last absurd insult to end on. Hewitt had hoped to be able to pay his respects following the ceremony, he said. “But as I am to dine with the Mayor it is barely possible that the interval will not be sufficient, in which case I pray you and Mrs. Roebling to accept the will for the deed.” Then he said, “Will you kindly give me the full name of Mrs. Roebling…”
On Saturday night, May 19, to test the lights before the opening day, the hidden dynamos were turned on, and people returning to Brooklyn by ferry between eleven and midnight were suddenly astonished to behold overhead a great display of light across the bridge from city to city. Whether they knew it or not, they were looking up at the future—steel and electricity.