24

The People’s Day

A festival so unique New York has seldom seen…

—Harper’s Weekly

ESTIMATES were that fully fifty thousand people from out of town came into the city that morning by train But probably that many again were arriving by boat. The Mary Powell had all she could carry. A Fall River steamer that docked at eleven had six hundred passengers on board and the boat from Stonington had that number or more. One iron steamer from New Haven carried a thousand people. How many private boats and “special excursions” came into the harbor was anyone’s guess. By midday all the major hotels were sold out.

The weather was perfect. “A fairer day for the ceremony could not have been chosen. The sky was cloudless, and the heat from the brightly shining sun was tempered by a cool breeze.” Countless flags snapped overhead all up and down Fifth Avenue and along Broadway, where the President was to pass. Buildings were draped in red, white, and blue, with banners and bunting floating from rooftops and window ledges, and most stores had some sort of display in their windows. In Madison Square, across from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, where the President and several of his Cabinet had spent the night, thousands of people were waiting, milling about under the trees or walking round and round the enormous torch and hand of the Statue of Liberty, which had been brought up from Philadelphia after the close of the Centennial.

At nine the fence across the Chatham Street entrance to the bridge had been torn down by workmen and replaced by a solid line of police. In another hour it was almost impossible to get within two blocks of the bridge. The streets leading to the river were packed solid with people. City Hall Park and Printing House Square were overrun. Every available rooftop and window was filled and along the river front there was scarcely a place left to stand.

The huge wagons that hauled milk and produce into the city had arrived as usual during the night, but loaded instead with country people, as many as twenty to a wagon, and now with their sunburned faces and bewildered looks they stood out plainly in the sea of people. “One moment they were clambering clumsily up the sides of stoops or balancing themselves insecurely on fences, and next they were pushing their way, with half awe-struck faces, through the crowds in the gutter out into the street itself,” wrote a reporter. “The crowd impressed them with awe, the buildings and flags with admiration, but the consuming desire of their heart was to see the President, the Governor, and other political magnates.”

There were as well, it seems, an abnormally large number of “symmetrical, shapely, graceful, elegant, neat, bright-eyed and comely women in brilliant costumes and resplendent colors,” and these remarkable creatures were “pushed, jostled, and inextricably mixed with ungainly, uncouth, and ill-favored women.” And in turn, they were all swayed back and forth and “jumbled up” with ragged men, with “rural swains” in frock coats and green ties, and with the unperturbed, self-contained New Yorker in dark suit and derby. “Embroidery, lace, fringe, trimmings and skirts were rent and torn by the friction of the crowd,” and the large corsages, which many of the women wore when they started out that morning, were, after a half hour’s experience in the crowd, crushed and torn to pieces. And everywhere, with or without adults in attendance, were “myriads of all sorts of children,” none of whom, for some miraculous reason or other, was trampled to death.

Vendors hawked gumdrops, bananas, flags, pictures of John A. and Washington Roebling, bridge buttons and commemorative medals that sold for fifteen cents. It was a great day too for circulating all kinds of advertisements. Thousands upon thousands of pamphlets, fans, and handbills having the bridge as a decorative element or part of the text were handed out and tucked away in dresser drawers later on as mementos of the historic occasion. By noon, down by the bridge itself, the blue tickets issued by the Bridge Company were selling for five dollars apiece. Liquor stores and saloons were doing three times their normal business. And at the Police Gazette building a riot was under way. Better than a thousand “sporting men” having responded to publisher Richard Fox’s invitation, the place was packed to the rooftop. Already the “guests” had consumed several hundred bottles of champagne and whiskey, devoured a barbecued ox, and were busily smashing up the furniture for fun when the police arrived to clear the building.

Schools were officially open in New York that day, but it would have been difficult to find a classroom that was not empty. And although the Stock Exchange too was open, the half-dozen brokers still on duty there had little to do but watch the visitors in the galleries. Elsewhere any business not closed by noon had been left in the charge of a few lonely clerks.

At the Custom House, Chester A. Arthur’s old domain, things were extremely quiet. The Post Office was open, but it too was as still as Sunday. Federal courts were closed and the only people inside the County Courthouse on Chambers Street were twelve jurors who had been locked up all night trying to agree on a verdict. At noon, gongs clanged on the floors of the Produce, the Cotton, the Maritime, the Mercantile, and the Coffee exchanges and all business promptly ceased. In less than an hour these buildings were empty, their doors locked. About the only place in town where business continued as usual was Castle Garden. It was remarked that only a storm on the North Atlantic ever stemmed the tide of immigration.

Why there was quite so much excitement in New York, some observers were at a loss to explain. For Brooklyn people the bridge had a great deal of importance obviously enough, but for these throngs, the Times noted, “there could have been no special cause of congratulation, since not one in one thousand of them will be likely to have occasion to use the new structure except for curiosity.”

No one will ever know when or how the story started. But possibly it was that morning, while the city waited for Chester A. Arthur to emerge from the Fifth Avenue Hotel, that one or more of those numberless countrymen in the crowd “purchased” the Brooklyn Bridge from some new-found city friend and thereby made an everlasting contribution to American folklore. Or perhaps it was one of the dark-eyed, mustachioed men being processed at Castle Garden, some brand-new aspiring American with his belongings tied up in string, who at the end of his very first walk in the New World that bright morning arrived somewhere in the neighborhood of the bridge in time to be taken. Or maybe the story simply started in the imagination of some contemplative onlooker who, after studying the people pressing by, concluded the large part of them would believe anything, buy anything, even the Brooklyn Bridge itself.

The sun was barely up in Brooklyn before the streets were swarming with people. Virtually every single house and building downtown had a flag flying from its rooftop or hung from a window. Or if not a flag then a string of Chinese lanterns. Along Fulton Street and on the Heights most buildings were covered with streamers and bunting. There were flags in all 120 windows of City Hall. The dome of the courthouse was “gorgeous in its dress of flying colors.” In City Hall Square the decoration that attracted the most attention was one in front of the Park Theater showing a straggling village of Brooklyn in 1746, the primitive ferry of 1814, then the completed bridge of 1883, and after that a view of the East River as it would look in 1983 with a hundred bridges spanning it. Joralemon Street on the Heights, Remsen, Montague, and Pierrepont, the streets running toward the river, were banked with flags and bunting. And in the little parks at the ends of these streets, at Columbia Heights, the trees were filled with Chinese lanterns and most of the biggest houses had lanterns strung all the way from basement to roof.

Every store window along Fulton, from the ferry to City Hall, on both sides of the street, and every doorway were decorated. A jeweler had made a miniature bridge with gold chain for the cables. A florist had made a bridge eight feet long, complete with bridge trains and boats passing below, all of flowers. Store windows carried framed portraits of the Chief Engineer and his father, Henry Cruse Murphy, Mayor Low, and General Slocum. And a sign in one window recalled something said a long time before: “Babylon had her hanging garden, Egypt her pyramid, Athens her Acropolis, Rome her Athenaeum; so Brooklyn has her Bridge.”

On the Heights the two most elaborately decorated private homes were those of Seth Low and Washington Roebling, the two places where the President was to be a guest. Clusters of silk flags were in the mayor’s windows and over his spacious doorway hung the flag of Brooklyn. Down the street, toward the bridge, the entire front of the Chief Engineer’s house was covered with flags, shields, flowers, and the coat of arms of New York and Brooklyn. Over the street, suspended high enough for carriages to pass beneath, was one immense American flag.

The river in the distance below was probably the most arresting spectacle of all. The water was actually a bright blue and it looked that morning as though every variety of ship afloat had gathered in a great, elongated flotilla that extended from the bay to somewhere upstream beyond the bridge. Flags were flying from the masts of ships tied up at the wharves below and along the opposite shore. “It was as if the forest of masts had blossomed beneath the influence of the young spring sunshine into a thousand gorgeous dyes. Everywhere the eye glanced there floated from, and almost concealed the network of rigging, flags and banners and signals and streamers…. All the vessels anchored in the stream were likewise a mass of fluttering color above their dark hulls.”

Sometime before noon the Atlantic Squadron came steaming up from the bay and into the river below the bridge, with the flagship, the Tennessee, anchoring about on a line with the Wall Street ferry. The others were strung out behind in a line reaching nearly as far as Governors Island and they too were covered with bunting and their crews of bluejackets could be seen quite plainly from the Brooklyn shore. One man later described how the gold trimmings on the officers’ uniforms flashed in the sun.

The ferries kept churning back and forth to New York the whole morning and were packed with people. On the Fulton Ferry it was just about impossible to move an arm or leg. Hundreds of people, it seems, had decided that the best possible way to witness the day’s events was to stick right on board and keep riding back and forth.

About noon there was a great surge toward Sands Street. Within half an hour at least ten thousand people had crammed into the narrow streets near the Brooklyn terminal, and a force of several hundred police, formed in a hollow square in front of the building, had all it could do to hold back the crowd. As in New York, vendors were everywhere, only here there seemed more of them, and along with pictures and commemorative medals, they were selling sheet music about the bridge and a variety of little facsimiles done in metal, wax, or confection. “On the whole it was a good-natured crowd,” wrote one observer.

Brooklyn’s part of the actual ceremonies got under way from City Hall at forty minutes past noon. The Twenty-third Regiment band in bright-red coats, followed by the Twenty-third Regiment in white helmets and blue coats, followed by a detachment of Fifth Artillery from Fort Hamilton and Marines from the Navy Yard, who in turn were followed by two hundred and some city officials, bridge trustees, and special guests, all in a body, led by the young mayor in a tall silk hat and followed by Mrs. Washington Roebling and her party in carriages, headed off down Remsen Street in the direction of the river, crossed Clinton, turned right at the next corner, onto Henry, and marched to the bridge. Their entire route was lined with crowds four and five deep. There were people looking down from rooftops and packed onto door stoops as mounted officers went clattering by and as one by one a great many familiar Brooklyn faces passed in review—ex-Comptroller Ludwig Semler…Judge McCue…Alfred Barnes…James Stranahan…William Kingsley…At Sands Street, where the police had cleared a path for them, all but a few of the civilians went directly into the station building, while the Twenty-third Regiment, Seth Low, William Kingsley, and a dozen others, at the command of “Route Step,” marched out onto the bridge.

When the Erie Canal was opened in the autumn of 1825, there were four former Presidents of the United States present in New York City for the occasion—John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe—as well as John Quincy Adams, then occupying the White House, and General Andrew Jackson, who would take his place. When the Brooklyn Bridge was opened on May 24, 1883, the main attraction was Chester A. Arthur.

Grover Cleveland, the portly new governor, was also there, and he, of course, would be the next President, but nobody knew that then and few even speculated on the prospect. In fact, if there was excitement about Cleveland’s presence that May morning, it was mostly because people were anxious to see what the man looked like. The only other noteworthy figure to look for was Abram Hewitt, who was never exactly a crowd-pleaser.

But the strapping Arthur was considered a New Yorker and he looked like a President if any man ever did. When he stepped into the sunshine from the main entrance of the Fifth Avenue Hotel at twelve forty, the response from the crowd was overwhelming. On his arm was Mayor Edson, an erect, gray, scholarly-looking man in gold-rimmed spectacles. A few steps behind were Grover Cleveland and Henry Slocum, all smiles and arm in arm now.

Arthur was dressed in black frock coat, white tie, and a flat-brimmed black beaver hat that he kept taking off in response to the ovation. “The women in the crowd raised their hands above the heads of the men and waved their handkerchiefs,” wrote one of the dozens of reporters covering the event, “and from the swarming windows on either hand similar feminine signals of hearty welcome met the Chief Magistrate’s eye as he stepped into his open carriage.” Cleveland went unrecognized for several minutes, but then he stood up in his carriage and lifted his hat, and the people, having concluded who he was, responded wholeheartedly.

The procession moved off, the “Dandy” Seventh Regiment and its band and a mounted police escort leading the way. Twenty-five carriages went rolling down Fifth to 14th Street, then east on 14th as far as Union Square, where they turned south again, down Broadway to City Hall. The greatest crowds anyone could remember seeing in New York lined the sidewalks and Chester A. Arthur, it would appear, was beloved by one and all. If he was not exactly a Jefferson or a Jackson nobody seemed to mind in the least.

It was one thirty when the procession wheeled into City Hall Park, where the press of people was almost beyond control. In another ten minutes Arthur and Cleveland had stepped down from their carriages and participated in a review of sorts. Then everyone formed up behind the Seventh Regiment, and with the band playing for all it was worth, everybody set off for the bridge on foot.

The historic ceremonial march to Brooklyn was made on the elevated promenade, but the roadways to either side of the promenade had already been opened to ticket holders and so thousands upon thousands of people lined the way. The band and soldiers went first, in route step as specified. Bayonets glinted in the sunshine and the music, whatever it was, had a decided effect on the dark-suited civilians. “It was a cheerful, jingling air which seemed to put life into the feet,” wrote a spectator.

Up on the New York tower a lone photographer was busily at work under a black hood.

Arthur, it was said, “trod the pathway with an elastic step” and “looked with evident admiration at the structure opening up to view.” (The next day a Broadway shoe merchant took space in the papers to announce that his “easy walking” shoes, made on patented lasts, had been “tested” at the opening of the bridge by President Arthur.) Cleveland was described as having a “wobbling gait,” like a London alderman.

Just before the New York tower the Seventh Regiment halted, formed into two lines at the right of the promenade, and presented arms as the President passed by. William Kingsley, who had been waiting with a delegation of trustees in the shadow of the arches, removed his hat and stepped forward to grasp the President’s hand. There was then a lively exchange of greetings and introductions, while the band played “Hail to the Chief” four times.

Guns were booming at Fort Hamilton and the Navy Yard as they all started out onto the main span. For Mayor Low and his Brooklyn reception committee, waiting beneath the opposite tower, only the heads of the lead men in the band could be seen as the procession approached—because of the gentle upward bow of the bridge. But as they came on, the heads gained shoulders and brass instruments. The oncoming figures not only grew larger as the distance narrowed, but more of each figure came steadily into view. They seemed to be coming up out of the planking of the promenade, the way approaching ships rise out of the horizon. Soon they had legs and feet and were on the downhill side of the span. Behind them, meanwhile, the solitary photographer on the New York tower had wheeled about 180 degrees and was back at work under his hood again. The band was playing full blast and the crowds on the carriageways to either side were cheering and waving as Arthur, “an Apollo in form,” trod by overhead. “The President ran his eye around the horizon with the air of one appreciating the happy combination of the works of God and man. He filled his lungs with the refreshing breeze…”

Just before the Brooklyn tower the soldiers again parted ranks for the others to pass through. Seth Low made the official greeting for the City of Brooklyn, the Marines presented arms, a signal flag was dropped nearby and instantly there was a crash of a gun from the Tennessee. Then the whole fleet commenced firing. Steam whistles on every tug, steamboat, ferry, every factory along the river, began to scream. More cannon boomed. Bells rang, people were cheering wildly on every side. The band played “Hail to the Chief” maybe six or seven more times, and as the New York Sun reported, “the climax of fourteen years’ suspense seemed to have been reached, since the President of the United States of America had walked dry shod to Brooklyn from New York.”

Under the arched roof of the great iron terminal some six thousand people were waiting. Enormous American flags hanging overhead were the only decorations but shafts of sunshine slanted through the long banks of windows and fell on the crowd like floodlights. The President and the Governor were to sit on a raised platform along the west side of the building, while directly opposite was a section for the trustees, city officials, clergy, and speakers of the day. Everyone else was packed onto a temporary wooden floor between these sections.

At the sight of Arthur “the great multitude in the station arose and gave vent to the wildest enthusiasm.” Handkerchiefs, parasols, and hats were waved in the air. The shouting even drowned out the band.

Presently James S. T. Stranahan began rapping for order with his cane and Bishop A. N. Littlejohn of Long Island stood up to offer a prayer.

All afternoon, as the speeches dragged on, thousands of men, women, and children went walking back and forth across the bridge, stopping now and then to exchange greetings with friends on neighboring housetops or to gaze down the smokestacks of the excursion steamers that floated slowly under the bridge with the outgoing tide. People were saying the ferries looked like water bugs from such a height. They waved to the crowds on the ferries and the crowds on the ferries waved back. Everybody seemed on a holiday. They joined arms. Some sang. Rooftops all along the river had been converted into “summer gardens,” in the expression of the day, where thousands more spent the afternoon drinking beer, singing, and enjoying the glorious sunshine.

What was it all about? What was everyone celebrating? The speakers of the day had a number of ideas. The bridge was a “wonder of Science,” an “astounding exhibition of the power of man to change the face of nature.” It was a monument to “enterprise, skill, faith, endurance.” It was also a monument to “public spirit,” “the moral qualities of the human soul,” and a great, everlasting symbol of “Peace.” The words used most often were “Science,” “Commerce,” and “Courage,” and some of the ideas expressed had the familiar ring of a Fourth of July oration. Still, everything considered, the speeches were quite appropriate on the whole and revealed much about the way people felt about the day and the bridge. The only real problem was that most of the audience never heard a word that was said, the big open-ended terminal being about the worst imaginable place to hold such a ceremony. There was no way to close off the din from outside and even under the best of circumstances the acoustics would have been miserable. For anybody sitting more than fifty feet from the speakers’ stand, which meant nearly everyone, it was more like watching men go through the motions of making a speech.

Kingsley, the first speaker, got up very slowly, his long, rigid figure seeming to unfold like a telescope, as someone remarked. He looked deadly serious the whole time and kept his head down as he read his speech. But the audience had its attention fixed on the ceiling to his right, where a flagstaff had come loose at one end and was swinging to and fro, its shiny brass spear aimed straight down. The people directly below were packed in so tightly that nobody could move out of the way and it was impossible to reach the spear. So there it stayed swinging ever so gently and silently as one by one the speakers went through their pantomime orations.

Mayor Low was next after Kingsley and as he stepped to the rostrum one well-dressed woman sitting nearby was heard to exclaim, “Why he is no more than a boy!” The Eagle said later he was more like the valedictorian of the day and complimented him on his excellent voice, which apparently some people could actually hear. True or not, President Arthur was seen to yawn behind his fan, then whisper something to Secretary of State Frelinghuysen, which made them both laugh, and farther down the line, Secretary of the Treasury Folger appeared to be taking a nap.

Mayor Low was not very long about what he had to say and Mayor Edson, who held his speech in kid gloves, took even less time, which may have accounted for the enormous cheer when he sat down. At that point Stranahan was about to introduce Hewitt, the main speaker, apparently having forgotten that Jules Levy, a cornet player, was supposed to be next on the program. But the smiling Levy stepped forward all the same and as the Times reported “put the great multitude in a good humor” by playing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Secretary Folger was seen to wake up and on the last note the crowd cheered so mightily that Levy did “Hail Columbia” as an encore. Again there was an ovation, but when Levy looked as though he was going to play still one more time, Stranahan seized him by the arm and led him off the platform. The audience was greatly disappointed by this and Levy looked furious. When Stranahan started to introduce Hewitt, Levy, from off stage, began playing “Yankee-Doodle.” There was a roar of laughter and Chester A. Arthur appeared to be more pleased by this part of the program than any other. Levy took his time on the last notes, while Stranahan, a man with no music in his soul, according to one account, just stood glumly waiting.

About the time Stranahan finished introducing Hewitt, a shaft of sunlight had fallen on the Presidential head and neck, whereupon an Army officer appeared from somewhere with a lady’s parasol, which he held over the portly Arthur until the close of the exercises. The World, now a Democratic paper, said he looked like an Asiatic potentate under the parasol.

It was also remarked that Abram Hewitt looked pale and rather “delicate” when he got up to speak, and by the time he finished, the audience had grown tired and extremely restless. But then the final speaker, the Reverend Dr. Storrs, was standing where Hewitt had been, a handsome, vibrant figure with flowing gray locks, who obviously felt at home before such a vast assembly and who punctuated every sentence with a nod, from the waist up, as if driving home each statement with his forehead. Storrs spoke for nearly an hour.

All told, the speeches, prayers, and cornet solos ran to nearly three hours and the Bridge Company’s gold-embossed commemorative booklet containing the full text of everything said runs to 122 pages. Neither Chester Arthur nor Grover Cleveland said a word from the rostrum; they had not been asked to speak nor did anyone expect them to. They were there as honored guests only, to watch and listen and enjoy themselves. Nor did anyone make any public mention of the Queen’s birthday.

Hewitt’s address would be generally regarded in retrospect as the most successful of the day and was probably the finest he ever gave. He himself liked it so much that he had it published as a pamphlet three years later for his mayoralty campaign against Henry George and Theodore Roosevelt. But every speaker that afternoon seemed to be saying that the opening of the bridge was a national event, that it was a triumph of human effort, and that it somehow marked a turning point. It was the beginning of something new, and although none of them appeared very sure what was going to be, they were confident it would be an improvement over the past and present.

Henry Murphy, the assistant engineers, “the humblest workman,” were all praised by one speaker or another and Kingsley, Seth Low, and Hewitt each in his way extolled the genius of the Roeblings. Hewitt compared John A. Roebling to Leonardo da Vinci but said Colonel Roebling was an even greater engineer than his father. Then he solemnly declared that the name of Emily Warren Roebling, a name he had not been quite sure of the week before, would be forever “inseparably associated with all that is admirable in human nature, and with all that is wonderful in the constructive world of art.”

Hewitt said, too, that he could vouch for the manner in which all bridge business had been conducted, that no money had been stolen by Tweed, that the whole money raised had been “honestly expended,” which was the part of his speech that drew the warmest response from those up front and on the platform. And disregarding, or perhaps misunderstanding, Roebling’s skeptical remarks about progress since the Pyramids, he compared the $2.50 day’s pay of the average bridge worker with the wage scale of ancient Egypt, which he figured at two cents a day in 1883 money. That in Hewitt’s view was real progress. The bridge was a vindication, a heroic and monumental end result of modern industrialism, of labor and capital, of democracy, of new “methods, tools and laws of force”—of the nineteenth century. Even the Times, never an admirer of Abraham Hewitt, liked this part of his speech.

But it was the neatly combed little valedictorian, Seth Low, who came closer than anyone that day to expressing what was probably everyone’s most deeply felt response to the bridge. “The beautiful and stately structure fulfills the fondest hope,” he said. “…The impression upon the visitor is one of astonishment that grows with every visit. No one who has been upon it can ever forget it…. Not one shall see it and not feel prouder to be a man.”

The Chief Engineer had sat alone at his window, his field glasses trained on the bridge, watching the procession until the last top-hatted figures at the tag end passed beneath the arches of the Brooklyn tower. Then he had stretched out on his bed for a rest. Sometime near four Emily had returned, having left the Sands Street terminal midway through the speeches. He put on a Prince Albert coat and went downstairs on her arm, to the front parlor, where they took a seat on the sofa and waited for the first guests to arrive. But it was nearly five thirty before President Arthur alighted from a carriage at the canvas canopy outside. The crowd in the street by then was such that the police were just able to keep a narrow path open to the door.

The house was decorated as if for a wedding. Both mantels in the drawing room were banked with red and white roses, wisteria, white lilacs, and in the center were clusters of calla lilies. On either side of the folding doors was a huge shield of roses. There were more roses and lilacs in gilt baskets and vases of cut flowers distributed through every room. And the balustrade on the stairway was trimmed with smilax all the way to the top floor.

There were busts of both the Chief Engineer and his father standing on one drawing-room mantel. On the elder Roebling’s white marble head Emily had placed a wreath of immortelles, while the one of her husband wore a laurel wreath decorated with tiny American flags and a white satin ribbon on which she had had printed in red and blue: “Chief Engineer Washington A. Roebling, May 24, 1883. Brooklyn Bridge. Let him who has won it bear the palm.”

A band was playing on a balcony above the drawing room, on the river side of the house, and through the doors beneath the balcony, out in the garden overlooking the river, stood a grand marquee and long tables of food and refreshments.

Emily and Washington Roebling stood side by side, just inside the parlor door, as the President and Seth Low entered the room together. “The engineer was pale, but he showed no excitement,” one observer noted. She was dressed in heavy black silk, trimmed in crepe, with a knot of violets in her belt. She was described by the papers as beautiful and vivacious.

It was said the President warmly congratulated the engineer as they shook hands. After that people kept pressing through the door in great numbers. In all there were more than a thousand guests, including Grover Cleveland, the two mayors, all the speakers of the day (Abram Hewitt did make an appearance, after all), Mr. and Mrs. William C. Kingsley, General and Mrs. Henry Slocum, Stranahan and his wife, all the other trustees and wives, the assistant engineers, Ferdinand and Charles Roebling and their wives, Elvira Stewart, Professor and Mrs. Methfessel, Moses Beach from next door, Simeon Chittenden, Henry Pierrepont, A. S. Barnes, William Sellers of the Edge Moor Iron Company, Ludwig Semler, former Mayor Grace, Judge McCue, Hamilton Fish, William Evarts, Congressman Flower, and the Reverend and Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher.

Roebling remained standing only ten minutes or so, then went back to the sofa, where he sat, not saying much, Emily beside him. The President meanwhile gave all the appearance of having a splendid time. He tapped his foot to the band music, admired the flowers, went out into the garden, shook a great many hands, and stayed perhaps an hour in all. Once he was gone, Roebling excused himself and there was a burst of applause as he went slowly back up the stairs. The reception lasted another hour or more after that, but for Roebling his first and last ceremonial duty as Chief Engineer was over.

Everyone on both sides of the river was waiting for dark. Those whose job it was to describe the scene in words went to great lengths to do it justice. One reporter who was out on the bridge wrote that the innumerable boats and ships on the river looked like a sleeping city. Another man who was also on the bridge wrote this:

As the sun went down the scene from the bridge was beautiful. It had been a perfect day. Up and down on either side of New York the bright blue water lay gently rippling, while to the south it merged into the great bay and disappeared toward the sea. The vast cities spread away on both sides. Beyond rolled the hilly country until it was lost in the mists of the sky. All up and down the harbor the shipping, piers, and buildings were still gaily decorated. On the housetops of both Brooklyn and New York were multitudes of people…

The great buildings in New York loomed up black as ink against the brilliant background of the sky. The New York bridge pier looked somber and gloomy as night. But in Brooklyn the blaze of the dying sun bathed everything gold. The great building looked like burnished brass…the west the sun sent its last tribute to the bridge in a series of great bars of golden light that shot up fanlike into the blue sky. Gradually the gold melted away, leaving the heavens cloudless. The sky was a light blue in the west, but grew darker as it rose, until it sank behind Brooklyn in a deep-sea blue.

Slowly the extremities of the twin cities began to grow indistinct…. The towers of Brooklyn lost their golden hue. They seemed to sink slowly into the city itself. In New York the outlines of the huge buildings became wavering and indistinct.

Then one by one the series of electric lights on the bridge leaped up until the chain was made from Brooklyn to New York. Dot by dot flashes of electric lights sprang up in the upper part of New York. The two great burners at Madison and Union Squares flared up, and the dome of the Post Office in New York set a circlet of diamonds out against the relief of the sky. The streets of the two cities sparkled into life like the jets on a limitless theatrical chandelier, and the windows of the houses popped into notice hundreds at a time. Long strings of lanterns were run over the rigging of the shipping in the harbor, and red and green port and starboard lights seemed numberless. The steamers sped to and fro on the water, leaving long ripples of white foam, which glistened in the light like silver.

In Brooklyn every public building was ablaze with gaslight. The Music Academy had a gas-jet rendition of the bridge out front. Houses draped with Chinese lanterns looked like Christmas trees. There were strings of lanterns over Montague Street and a block over, on Pierrepont, the Historical Society windows were lighted with hundreds of candles. Columbia Heights was nearly as bright as day with gaslights, lanterns, candles. Simeon Chittenden had a big sign in front of his house done in gas jets—“Welcome to Brooklyn’s Guests”—but as the President was driven past later in the evening, a gust of wind blew out half the letters.

Every street on the Heights looked like a carnival. Indeed the crowds in both cities were far greater now than at any time earlier in the day. No traffic was moving anywhere near the river. Uptown New York and the inland sections of Brooklyn were all but deserted. Where there had been a hundred people watching by the river during the day, now there were a thousand, or at least so it seemed. The Times estimated there were 150,000 people just in the neighborhood of City Hall.

Suddenly a solitary rocket shot into the sky over Columbia Heights and burst into a spray of blue stars. It had come from the mayor’s house, where the dinner for the President had been going on.

Almost instantly the lights on the bridge went out. For a moment not a thing could be seen of it. Then there was a long, distant hissing sound, a sudden roar, and fifty rockets exploded simultaneously high over the main span of the bridge, while at least twenty bombs burst higher still, from above the towers, and poured down great showers of gold and silver. “From an elevated point the city seemed to be in volcanic action, with the spouting crater on the suspension bridge.”

At its final meeting on May 14, as its last official act, the Executive Committee of the Bridge Company had contracted with the New York firm of Detwiller & Street, Pyrotechnists, to put on a display of fireworks “worthy of the place and the occasion.” In all, fourteen tons of fireworks—more than ten thousand pieces—were set off from the bridge.

It lasted a solid hour. There was not a moment’s letup. One meteoric burst followed another. Rockets went off hundreds at a time and were seen from as far away as Montclair, New Jersey. Bombs exploded incessantly above the towers, bathing the bridge in red. In the strange light, firemen on the bridge could be seen in strong silhouette and the water from their hoses looked like molten silver. Meantime, innumerable gas balloons were being sent aloft. They were fifty feet in circumference and loaded with fireworks and as they swung into the sky, one by one, they scattered balls of colored fire over the river.

At each burst of a rocket a huge roar went up from the shores. Hundreds of thousands of people were watching—probably the biggest crowd ever gathered in New York until that time—and nobody, in all his days, had ever seen anything like this.

Nearly every boat on the water was making some sort of noise or display. Rockets and fireworks were shooting up from the middle of the river and down the bay. On one big excursion steamer, ablaze with lights, a calliope was shrieking out “America.” Bands were playing on board other boats.

Rockets were going up all over New York meantime—and in Brooklyn. From the middle of the bridge now came great thunderclap reports as zinc balls, fired from mortars, burst five hundred feet up, fairly illuminating the two cities, like sustained lightning.

And finally, at nine, as the display on the bridge ended with one incredible barrage—five hundred rockets fired all at once—every whistle and horn on the river joined in. The rockets “broke into millions of stars and a shower of golden rain which descended upon the bridge and the river.” Bells were rung, gongs were beaten, men and women yelled themselves hoarse, musicians blew themselves red in the face. And then when it was all over and nearly quiet again and the boats on the river were beginning to untangle themselves, there was one last memorable touch that not even Detwiller & Street, Pyrotechnists, could have arranged. “Hardly had the last falling spark died out,” wrote an editor who had been watching from the top of the Tribune Building, “when the moon rose slowly over the further tower and sent a broad beam like a benediction across the river.”

The grand reception for the President at the Music Academy, which began almost immediately after the fireworks, was considered a great success. The President, Grover Cleveland, William Kingsley, General Slocum, and twenty or thirty others stood on the stage, surrounded by a small forest of potted palms, while the people of Brooklyn were permitted to pass by and pay their respects. The procession lasted until ten. Arthur was in fine humor still, bowing, smiling, playing his part exactly as everybody would have wanted him to. And one member of his Cabinet was heard to remark, “Why I thought that Brooklyn had one hotel and a shipyard or two, but it’s quite a town.”

It had been announced in advance that the bridge would be thrown open to the public at the stroke of midnight and that anyone might cross upon payment of one cent. Enormous crowds had gathered at both ends.

At eleven twenty two young men with blond mustaches raised the windows of the Brooklyn toll booths and H. R. Van Keuren—a good Brooklyn name, reporters decided—was the first to put his money in the box. The first lady to cross was a Mrs. C. G. Peck of Baltic Street. The first vehicle from the Brooklyn side was an old-fashioned top-wagon drawn by a bony white horse whose large white hooves came down on the bridge floor with a noise like the discharge of musketry. The driver was a Charles Overton from Coney Island, who had been waiting at the gate for two hours and who also managed to make the first trip across from the New York side, since the gates there opened ten to fifteen minutes later than those in Brooklyn.

A fierce struggle ensued at the New York gates, characteristically, and perhaps it was altogether appropriate that the first man through was the Keeper of the City Hall. Once he was beyond the gate, there was an even more violent rush from behind. Police began swinging their clubs and several people had been rather roughly treated by the time the whole crowd—perhaps three thousand people—was strung out in along orderly line.

People poured across the bridge through the entire night and were still coming with the first light in the sky. According to a count kept by the Times, the first beggar to cross came over from Brooklyn, as did the first drunk, the first policeman, the first hearse (which was empty), the first “dude,” the first Negro, and the first musician, a Scottish bagpiper who marched over playing “The Campbells Are Coming.”

How late the Chief Engineer and his wife stayed up watching from their window, who may have been with them during the evening, what they said to each other, or what reflections went unsaid as bombs and rockets burst over the bridge, can only be guessed at.

In another time and in what would seem another world, on a day when two young men were walking on the moon, a very old woman on Long Island would tell reporters that the public excitement over the feat was not so much compared to what she had seen “on the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.”