FOR NEARLY fifty years after it was completed the Brooklyn Bridge reigned supreme as the most magnificent, if not technically the largest, suspension bridge on earth.
In its initial days as a public thoroughfare it was commonly referred to as “The Eighth Wonder of the World” and it was an even greater sensation than anyone had expected. On its first full day, May 25, 1883, a total of 150,300 people crossed on foot and 1,800 vehicles went over carrying an unknown number of others. The following day, a Saturday, the count was down. But on Sunday, May 27, a spectacular spring day, 163,500 people went “strolling” on the Great Bridge. One veteran New York policeman said he had never in all his experience seen such crowds. “It seems to me as if the people have got the bridge craze,” he said.
And then, tragically, on Thursday, May 31, a week to the day after the bridge was opened, the very thing Roebling had warned against happened.
It was Memorial Day, a holiday in both cities, and the weather was ideal. There had been thousands on the bridge all morning. But C. C. Martin had allowed pedestrian traffic on both carriageways and that had taken pressure off the promenade until some time near three thirty when the crowds began to build rapidly. Probably twenty thousand people were on the bridge by four, or the approximate time of the panic. When it was all over, twelve people had been trampled to death.
The trouble began at the top of a narrow flight of stairs leading to the promenade at the end of the New York approach. A crowd pressing up the stairs was running head on into another crowd coming in the opposite direction, from the New York tower. There were fifteen steps in all, broken into two flights by a landing just seven feet wide. When the two oncoming throngs met there, it was virtually impossible for anyone to move either way and people approaching from behind, in both directions, kept trying to shove their way forward.
But from what several eyewitnesses said later, it seems some sort of order might have been restored had not a woman coming down the stairway lost her footing. Another woman began to scream at the top of her lungs and there was an immediate rush to see what was happening. Those who were packed onto the stairway tried desperately to hold back the crowd but it was impossible. In an instant three or four more lost their balance and fell. Meanwhile, the crowds farther back on the promenade kept advancing, nobody knowing what was going on up ahead, and in a moment the whole stairway was packed with dead and dying men, women, and children. People were shrieking and screaming and those who suddenly found themselves at the brink of the stairway and saw what was happening turned to shout for those behind to move back, but then they too lost their step and went over on top of the trampled bodies below. The most terrifying crush was on the promenade just back from the top of the stairs. Numerous people had their clothes torn off. In places, it was reported, people were jammed so tight that blood oozed from their noses and ears.
Hats, umbrellas, gloves, shoes, loose change, fell between the bridge train tracks and rained down on the housetops and streets below. Among a group of boys playing in the streets was Al Smith. “That was my first view of a great calamity,” he said later. “I did not sleep for nights.”
Other explanations would be given later. It would be said that somebody out in the middle of the bridge began to scream that it was falling. It would be said a gang of “roughs” from New York had started pushing and shoving people. Probably there is some truth to both accounts.
Lawsuits as a result of the accident added up to half a million dollars, but no negligence was proved. A coroner’s jury reprimanded the Bridge Company for the narrowness of the stairway and for employing too few police. The Bridge Company blamed the newspapers for having created an “undefined feeling of insecurity” about the bridge, but promptly doubled the number of police on the promenade.
C. C. Martin remained in charge. He was officially named Chief Engineer on July 9, 1883, after Roebling had submitted his formal resignation, and he would hold that job until 1902, devoting, in all, thirty-three years of his life to the bridge.
Martin’s full force for operating and maintaining the bridge was comparable in size to that needed for a large ship or fair-sized factory of the day. He had one assistant engineer, a chief mechanical engineer, who had charge of the steam engines and rope traction, three assistant mechanical engineers, three oilers, and three firemen. There were six locomotive engineers, six locomotive firemen, one master of transportation, forty-five conductors, a superintendent of tolls, nineteen collectors, one trainmaster, four train dispatchers, four yardmen, and five switchmen. A master machinist had charge of the machine shop and locomotives. There were two blacksmiths, a foreman of carpenters with “a force of men changing with the exigencies of the work,” a foreman of car repairs and inspector of grips, a foreman of labor and general work, one captain of police, one sergeant, three roundsmen, and eighty-six policemen. Counting Martin, the grand total came to 201 full-time employees.
The bridge trains began running in September and worked to perfection. By the time it was a year old 37,000 people a day were using the bridge, or very nearly as many people as fourteen ferries were handling the year it was begun. In their first full year of service the bridge trains carried 9,234,690 passengers, but then the completion of the Brooklyn Elevated to Fulton Ferry more than doubled the patronage. In 1885 the bridge trains handled nearly twenty million passengers. The trains ran twenty-four hours a day and by 1888, just five years after the bridge was built, they were handling more than thirty million passengers a year. The terminals were expanded, more cars were put into service. Furthermore, the ferries were still in business, to the surprise of people, and would be for a long time to come. The last Brooklyn ferry, between Hamilton Avenue and the Battery, stopped running on June 30, 1942.
In May of 1884, P. T. Barnum, “in the interest of the dear public,” took a herd of twenty-one elephants, including the famous “Jumbo,” over the bridge to Brooklyn and thereupon declared that he, too, was now perfectly satisfied as to the solidity of the masterpiece.
And inevitably, perhaps, there were certain individuals who would see the bridge as a challenge to their manhood or as a means of doing away with themselves. The bridge was scarcely in full operating order before they began leaping from it, for glory or oblivion, and frequently with the unintended result.
The first to try for glory was Robert E. Odium, a brawny swimming instructor from Washington, D.C. On May 19, 1885, to divert the bridge police who were waiting to stop him, Odium sent a friend onto the bridge to go through the motions of jumping. Then he came riding up in a closed carriage, stepped out, climbed onto the railing, and, dressed in trunks and a bright-red swimming shirt, jumped to his death, with one arm thrust straight over his head, the other clamped firmly to his side.
Steve Brodie, the only man ever to become famous for jumping from the bridge, probably never did. He was a personable, unemployed Irishman in his early twenties, who, not long after Odlum’s much publicized failure, began boasting that he would be the next to jump. Bets were made along the Bowery, but just when Brodie intended to jump remained a mystery. Then on July 23, 1886, it was announced he had done it and lived to tell the tale. Several friends said they had been witnesses, that they had watched him plummet straight into the river, where he was picked up by a passing barge. But nobody else had seen his jump and it was commonly said among the skeptics, of whom there were a great many, that a dummy had been dropped from the bridge and that Brodie merely swam out from shore in time to surface beside the passing barge.
Brodie was put in jail briefly for his supposed feat, then opened a saloon that became a favorite Bowery stop for sight-seers and slumming parties. In the main barroom hung a large oil painting of the bridge and there for all to see was Brodie plunging toward the water. For further historical documentation, there was a framed affidavit from the barge captain who claimed to have rescued the hero.
But Steve Brodie’s jump from the Brooklyn Bridge would be fixed forever in the public imagination by a play called On the Bowery, which opened in 1894. Brodie was the star and his big scene was a leap from the bridge, done with all sorts of elaborate special effects, only this time it was to save the girl, who had been thrown off by the villain. The play was a smash hit and eventually toured the country. A bridge sweeper sang a moral ballad, Brodie sang “My Pearl’s a Bowery Girl!” (“My Poil’s a Bowery Goil!”) and, for encores, a song called “The Bowery,” written for an earlier production, which became a standard part of every performance.
Brodie became rich and famous, but died of diabetes at age thirty-six or thereabouts, in 1901. For years after his celebrated jump people kept asking him why he did not do it again, only this time with reliable witnesses. His answer was always the same: “I done it oncet.”
Others kept on trying. Larry Donovan, a pressman at the Police Gazette, was the first to jump successfully. He went over the side wearing a red shirt like Odlum and a pair of baseball shoes. In 1887 James Martin, a painter’s assistant on the bridge, fell off and lived and the following year a young man named Byrnes jumped to impress his girl friend and he too lived. In 1892 Francis McCarey jumped and was killed, but it seems that was what he wanted, so probably he ought to be considered the first suicide.
Then there was a man who jumped wearing a derby hat and was still wearing it when he surfaced in the river quite unharmed and another man who went off wearing immense canvas wings. He sailed a thousand feet upstream before landing safely on the water. But by the turn of the century the jumping craze had ended.
The bridge remained a subject of endless fascination for almost everybody who saw it. For the millions of immigrants arriving in New York through the 1880’s and 1890’s and on into the new century, it was one of the first things to be seen of the New World as they came up the bay. It was one of the landmarks they all looked for, the great world-famous symbol of the faith that was literally moving mountains. And the fact that it had been designed by an immigrant and built largely by immigrant workers did much naturally to enhance its appeal.
In truth there is really no end to the number of things the bridge meant to people. For whole generations growing up in New York and Brooklyn it was simply a large, dominant, and generally beloved part of the natural order of things. The river without the bridge or Brooklyn without the bridge would have been unthinkable and year after year people went to it on especially fine days, or at moments of personal stress or joy, the way people go to a mountain or walk beside the sea.
For countless people their first walk on the bridge would remain one of childhood’s earliest memories. Countless others would tell how it was the place where they fell in love. No doubt it very often was. Al Smith was among those who loved to sing “Danny by My Side,” the opening line of which runs “The Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday is known as lovers’ lane.”
In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the most popular of the many novels to be written with a Brooklyn setting, a young World War I soldier from Pennsylvania says, “I thought if ever I got to New York, I’d like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge.” It was something felt by whole generations of Americans before and since. They would come from every part of the country, take photographs of it and from it with one of the new Kodak cameras introduced not long after the bridge was finished, or buy some of the stereopticon views that sold by the millions. They would ride bicycles across, take honeymoon strolls by moonlight, carry newborn babies proudly down the promenade, or scatter the ashes of the dearly departed from the middle of the main span.
It was a place to go on stifling summer evenings, to take some exercise to and from work, to walk the baby, to watch the gulls, to find relief from the city. Its promenade was and would remain one of the most exhilarating walks on the continent. To be on the promenade of the Brooklyn Bridge on a fine day, about halfway between the two towers, looking over the harbor and the city skyline, was to be at one of the two or three most soul-stirring spots in America, like standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon.
Just why this bridge, more than all others, has had such a hold on people is very hard to pin down. But in the years since it opened it has been the subject of more paintings, engravings, etchings, lithographs, and photographs than any man-made structure in America. There are probably a thousand paintings and lithographs of the bridge by well-known artists alone. * It has been the setting for scenes in films, for Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, and for all kinds of advertising. (It would seem that a whole chronological display of female fashions in America, since the advent of photography, could be assembled just from pictures posed on the bridge year after year.) It has been used repeatedly on postcards, Christmas cards, book jackets, posters, record jackets. It has been the symbol for a New York television network and for a popular Italian chewing gum.
There have been songs about the bridge, besides the one Al Smith liked, and a great many poems, nearly all of which have been less than memorable. The one notable exception is The Bridge by Hart Crane, who, in the 1920’s, to identify as closely as possible with his subject, moved into Washington Roebling’s old house at 110 Columbia Heights. In Crane’s powerful but not altogether coherent masterpiece, the bridge is seen as a shining symbol of affirmation at the end of an epic search through the American past. It is the “Tall Vision-of-the Voyage,” spare, “silver-paced,” and all-redeeming.
The finest thing written at the time the bridge was opened appeared in Harper’s Weekly. The author was a newspaperman named Montgomery Schuyler and his article, “The Bridge as a Monument,” was not only the first critical review of the great work, but a bugle call, as Lewis Mumford would say, for serious architectural criticism in America. Schuyler did not think much of the bridge as a work of art. Still, everything considered, he judged it “one of the greatest and most characteristic” structures of his century. “It so happens,” he wrote, “that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity, is a work of bare utility; not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge.”
The towers, he believed, would outlast everything else on either shore, and he asked his readers to imagine some future archaeologist surveying the ruins of New York, “a mastless river and a dispeopled land.” The cables and roadway would have long since disintegrated, he said. The Roeblings would be as forgotten as the builders of the Pyramids. Only the towers of the Great Bridge would remain standing and the archaeologist would have “no other means of reconstructing our civilization.” “What will his judgment of us be?”
Henry James, writing soon after the turn of the century, would see something darkly ominous in the looming silhouette of the bridge and its shuttling trains. New York for him had become a “steel-souled machine room,” the end product of which was “merciless multiplications” and the bridge was a “monstrous organism,” marking the beginning of a new age. For James the prospect was chilling.
By the 1920’s, however, the bridge was a unique source of “joy and inspiration” for the critic Lewis Mumford.
The stone plays against the steel; the heavy granite in compression, the spidery steel in tension. In this structure, the architecture of the past, massive and protective, meets the architecture of the future, light, aerial, open to sunlight, an architecture of voids rather than solids.
The bridge proved, he said, that industrialism need not be synonymous with ugliness. It was something done exceedingly well by Victorian America. “All that the age had just cause for pride in—its advances in science, its skill in handling iron, its personal heroism in the face of dangerous industrial processes, its willingness to attempt the untried and the impossible—came to a head in Brooklyn Bridge.”
Others, later, would see it as a symbol of liberation, of release from the “howling chaos” on either shore. It would be said that at heart it was a monumental embodiment of the open road, the highway call, the abiding rootlessness that runs in the American grain—“not so much linking places as leaving them and shooting untrammeled across the sky.” And an age that can no longer regard it as an engineering marvel has declared it a work of art. One prominent contemporary American architect has gone so far as to say it is one of the two works of architecture in New York of any real importance, the other one being Central Park.
It has also, of course, been taken quite for granted by millions who use it regularly and quite sentimentally by some. It can be seen as merely one of a number of different ways to get to or from Brooklyn or as the grandest sort of memento of a New York that was, a serene, aspiring emblem rising out of an exhilarating and confident age too often remembered solely for its corruption and gimcrackery. It can be seen as the beginning of modern New York—of monumental scale, of structural steel—or the end of old Brooklyn. It is all these. And possibly its enduring appeal may rest on its physical solidity and permanence, the very reverse of rootlessness. It says, perhaps, as does nothing else built by Americans before or since, that we had come to stay.
For Brooklyn, on a more practical level, it did everything its proponents had promised. It stimulated growth, raised property values, and provided a safe, reliable alternative to the ferries. It put Brooklyn on the map.
Rush hours at the terminals were like nothing ever witnessed before, not even at the old Fulton Ferry slip in Brooklyn, not even on the uptown platforms of New York’s elevated trains. Certainly there was little semblance of the smooth, efficient transfer of humanity that John A. Roebling had pictured. But the bridge also withstood the Blizzard of 1888; it carried trolley cars, along with everything else, when they were installed on the carriageways and elevated trains when they replaced the cable cars. It accommodated ever greater numbers of people year by year. But it was not enough.
In 1903 the Williamsburg Bridge was completed upstream from the Navy Yard, from designs by an RPI man with the old Brooklyn name of Leffert Lefferts Buck. Heavy, ungainly-looking, built entirely of steel with a stiffening truss no less than forty feet deep, it was four and a half feet longer than the Brooklyn Bridge, which meant it was now the world’s largest suspension bridge. One of the assistant engineers was C. C. Martin’s son, Kingsley Martin, and the cables were of Roebling wire. Wilhelm Hildenbrand and Charles Roebling were in charge of the cable making.
Six years later, when the Brooklyn Bridge was handling half a million people a day, two more bridges were finished. The Manhattan, another suspension bridge, was built almost side by side with the Brooklyn Bridge, just upstream. The Queensboro Bridge, a cantilever, took a route John A. Roebling once considered, over Blackwell’s (now Welfare) Island.
More than a dozen tunnels were built beneath the river for subways, railroads, water lines, and automobiles. * And for these reasons primarily Brooklyn changed beyond anyone’s imagining.
In 1898 with a population of nearly a million people and still the third-largest city in the United States, Brooklyn had relinquished its independence to become a borough of New York. By 1930 Brooklyn’s population was greater than that of Manhattan. Old Brooklyn families had become an infinitesimal minority, the Heights a tiny picturesque but inconsequential segment of a Brooklyn that spread over eighty-nine square miles, or four times the area of Manhattan. Even the name Brooklyn became synonymous with things never heard of before the turn of the century—the Dodgers, Murder Incorporated—and the butt of innumerable jokes. One favorite vaudeville remark about the bridge went, “All that trouble, just to get to Brooklyn.”
In 1931 the George Washington Bridge was completed over the Hudson with a span more than twice that of the Brooklyn Bridge and six years later the Golden Gate Bridge, larger and still more awesome, was built at the opposite end of the continent. By contrast to such gleaming creations, the Brooklyn Bridge seemed an antique and there was even talk of tearing it down.
In 1944 the elevated trains stopped running over the bridge and the old iron terminal buildings were dismantled. A team of engineers began a painstaking examination of the entire structure to see what ought to be done about it. When they had concluded their studies two years later, it was announced that all the bridge needed was a new coat of paint.
Washington Roebling did not live to see the bridge eclipsed by the George Washington or Golden Gate Bridges, both of which were built with Roebling wire, but he came very close to it. Ironically—incredibly—the crippled, tormented legendary Chief Engineer lived on until 1926. He outlasted them all—Hewitt and Seth Low, each of whom became mayor of New York; Stranahan, who lived to be ninety and to see a statue of himself put up in Prospect Park; Kingsley, who died only a few years after the bridge was built, of a nervous stomach at age fifty-two; Eads, who died in 1887, while trying to enlist support for a fantastic ship railway across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec; Slocum, whose name would be remembered for one of the worst disasters in American history, the burning, in 1904, of the General Slocum, a New York excursion steamer; and every one of the assistant engineers, each of whom, except for Martin, went his own separate way professionally once the bridge was finished.
On the night Seth Low was defeated for re-election as mayor of New York, Roebling came up from Trenton to watch the returns in front of the Herald building and was very pleased by the results. But all he ever said for attribution concerning the old management of the bridge was that so far as he knew no money had ever been stolen—a decidedly different conclusion, of course, from what he said in his private notes years before. His exact statement, written at age seventy-eight, in a letter to an old friend then compiling a Trenton history, was this: “So far as I know not a dollar was stolen politically or otherwise. There was no thievery—no political robbery or peculation. In spite of the assertions of all the newspapers to the contrary. It is the unscrupulous press that makes most of the trouble.”
He seems to have kept in touch with his former assistants over the years. McNulty named a son after him and Hildenbrand did a good deal of engineering work for John A. Roebling’s Sons. Hildenbrand, in fact, had quite a life after he left Brooklyn. He built the Pikes Peak Railway in Colorado, directed the complete renovation of the Ohio River bridge at Cincinnati, and built a suspension bridge of his own, of about the same span as the Ohio River bridge, at Mapimi, Mexico. Not long after Hildenbrand died, in 1908, Roebling wrote, “Soon I will be the last leaf on the tree.”
For four years after the completion of the bridge, he and Emily lived in Troy, in order to be near their son, who was then at Rensselaer. Roebling spent his time quietly. Often the old pains and cramps returned with a vengeance and he felt himself a “used-up man.” Still the sustained separation from both the bridge and the wire business seemed to be what was needed. His health improved gradually but steadily.
In the spring of 1888, when his son was graduated, the three of them moved back to Trenton. John went to work at the mill and was married the following year. In the meantime, plans were drawn up, to Emily’s specifications, for a “commodious mansion in the Tudor style,” which Roebling had built for her on West State Street, on grounds sloping down to the Delaware River. The house took several years to finish. It was a great baronial affair of huge gables and towering brick chimneys, and on the street side there was a big stained-glass rendition of the Brooklyn Bridge, complete with clouds sailing by and ships passing below. At night, all lit up, this window was considered one of Trenton’s “sights” and for years people went out of their way to see it.
They moved in in 1892. She bought the most expensive carriages and the finest horses, which she insisted always on driving herself, her coachman seated behind her. For a number of years she seems to have had quite a good time. She entertained often and beautifully to judge by some old clippings from the Trenton society columns. She became active in women’s clubs. She studied law at New York University and received her degree. She worked on a book about Cold Spring. * She went to Europe twice. The first time they went together, but the second time, in 1896, she went without him and to Russia as well, where she was one of the few Americans present at the coronation of Tsar Nicholas and the Empress Alexandra. A formal photograph of Emily Roebling in the dress she wore to the coronation shows an erect, confident-looking woman in her early fifties, a little stout but rather regal herself in silvery white satin.
From Roebling’s correspondence during these years, one gets a picture of him living in semiseclusion, privately very proud of her accomplishments, absorbed in all manner of interests—his mineral collection, his greenhouse, bird-watching, astronomy, the paleontological history of New Jersey. He also wrote a two-hundred-page biography of his father, which he misplaced and which was never found, most unfortunately. His one recreation was riding the trolleys, which he seems to have enjoyed enormously, riding out into the nearby countryside to look for wild flowers. And these he could identify and refer to by their Latin names as readily as a trained botanist.
When he felt well enough, he traveled with her—to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, to Martha’s Vineyard, which he liked, to Nantucket, which he did not, and to New York, where they went out on the bridge together unnoticed.
He read Schiller and Goethe, Carlyle’s six-volume Frederick the Great, which he had read before as a young man, and Tolstoy, his favorite. He followed the stock market and made a very great deal of money at it.
He also kept an attentive eye on the wire business, in which he was again a major stockholder, but drew no salary. He liked to take his lunch at the office, which was the old family home long since so built over and swallowed up by the mills that it was barely identifiable. He was always available for his opinion and his opinion carried some weight apparently. Once when his brothers were all for selling out to U. S. Steel, he said no and that was that. But his relations with his brothers were always strained. Ferdinand was so bothered by the grand new house when it was first finished that he refused to enter it. For two years Ferdinand and he did not speak.
His one male confidant was his son, but communication with him had to be carried on by mail. John had lasted only a short time in the wire business. It is impossible to tell just what went wrong. The official explanation was that John had retired because of his health. But it was commonly said in Trenton that family affections and loyalties (if there were any) stopped at the door of the Roebling works. If a young man did not measure up inside, or if there were personality conflicts, then he departed rapidly, even if his name was Roebling.
Years before, Edmund Roebling, youngest of old John’s sons, had been unable to get along with Ferdinand and was “kicked out,” according to Washington Roebling. “He was now adrift with too much money, became a globe-trotter, and was somewhat dissipated.” Edmund never returned to Trenton, never married, lived on in seclusion on the Upper West Side of New York.
Emily’s health began to fail about the time the new century began. It would be said later that the strain of her experiences in Brooklyn was the principal cause. Her eyes gave her trouble at first and she took to wearing dark glasses. In the fall of 1902 Roebling went into Roosevelt Hospital in New York for some intestinal surgery and in early December, in Trenton, while he was still recuperating, she had a collapse of some sort. The doctors said she had stomach ulcers and were not encouraging. He kept going back and forth to Trenton from the hospital, a torturous trip for him, to be with her for a day or two at a time.
An additional night nurse was hired in early February. He was home to stay by then and joked with her about renaming the house Roebling Hospital. Though pitifully weak, she refused to give up and announced she would go to the mineral baths at Sharon Springs, New York. But she never did. She died of cancer of the stomach on February 28, 1903, and was buried at Cold Spring. He was too weak to make the trip.
In the file of Roebling’s letters kept by his son there is an envelope marked “Undated notes, clippings, etc, found among W.A.R.’s papers after his death.” Among the items in the envelope is a much-worn paper on which Roebling had copied in pencil an epitaph Mark Twain inscribed on the grave of his daughter:
Warm Summer Sun shine kindly here
Warm Summer Wind blow softly here
Green Sod above, lie light, lie light
Good night, Dear heart, good night, good night.
For five years after Emily’s death he lived alone with the house and servants. The wire business in this time became the biggest in the world. The demand seemed unending—for telegraph wire, baling wire, electrical wire, for wire cloth, for bridge cable wire, for the construction of the Panama Canal, for wire rope for cable roads, coal mines, ships, oil rigs, logging machinery, tramways, elevators. The Otis Elevator Company was buying nearly all its cable from the Roeblings. The sons of John A. Roebling had become millionaires many times over. Washington Roebling’s own estate would be approximately $29 million.
On fall afternoons in 1904, in Kinkora, New Jersey, a tiny village on the Delaware ten miles below Trenton, he watched the building of a new mill complex and an entire town of brick houses and broad streets that was to become known eventually as Roebling. His brothers had announced that the town was being built only out of “plain business necessity” and that there was to be nothing utopian about it. But to the surprise of very few, it turned out to be one of the best-planned industrial towns ever built in America, a model in every respect, as company towns went. In the view of many old admirers of the family, it was a fitting extension of ideas that had spurred John Roebling on at Saxonburg so many years before.
The memory of his father remained a looming presence for Roebling. Confusion over which one of them had built the Brooklyn Bridge became increasingly common as the years passed and for him a sore subject. Time was cheating him out of everything, he lamented, even his identity. When the family decided to erect a larger-than-life-size statue of the old man and the sculptor said the few photographs on hand were not suitable, Roebling agreed to pose. He sat several times, his head turned as though studying some distant horizon, a sheaf of plans on one knee. When the finished bronze was unveiled with much to-do in Trenton’s Cadwalader Park in 1908, a great many people came up to tell him how much it looked like him.
To the surprise of almost everyone, he married again, that same year. She was a widow of about his own son’s age, Mrs. Cornelia Witsell Farrow of Charleston, South Carolina. How they happened to meet, when, or how long he had been contemplating marriage are all unclear. “…these relationships are those of the heart, not governed by reason or judgment,” he had written to John. “A second marriage late in life cannot be judged by the standard of the first because its motives are usually quite different.” John and the rest of the family heartily approved of the decision once he announced it, and of Mrs. Farrow, who, it was said, helped him “take a less gloomy view of things.” The Colonel even “became at times almost jovial.”
He who had weathered everything just lived on interminably, forever “bearing up,” people said. His teeth were pulled, one by one, and in his letters to John he complained repeatedly of physical torment and in particular of excruciating pains in his jaw. He was seized with a terror of contracting tetanus and dying like his father. “And yet people say how well you look,” he wrote, “I feel like killing them.”
In April 1912 his nephew and namesake, Washington A. Roebling, III, Charles Roebling’s son, went down on the Titanic and the family was news again. An editor of the New York Times wrote to ask if he would be good enough to explain, for the historical record, the part his mother had played in helping John A. Roebling build the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling wrote back, explaining patiently that he was the one who had built the bridge, not his father, and that it was Emily, not his mother, who had been associated “for fourteen long years with the various phases of the work.”
When the income tax came along in 1913, it was as though the country was coming apart at the seams. “It means 100,000 spies to snoop into everybody’s business and affairs.” When war broke out in Europe he shuddered at the fate of mankind. “It has come to this pass, that for an extra German to live, he must kill somebody else to make room for him. We can all play at that game. It means perpetual universal war.”
And still he carried on, writing long, affectionate letters to John, taking solitary walks down West State Street. “War in the kitchen as usual,” he reported to John in August of 1916. “The cook touched the laundress’s smoothing iron. War to the Knife, peace impossible—damages 5 strands of hair, 4 aprons torn, 2 scratches. Starvation threatens!” Somebody was watering his whiskey.
His “oddities” became a favorite topic of conversation in Trenton. When he and Cornelia dined out at the homes of friends or one of his brothers, he would frequently proceed, without a word of explanation, to make himself comfortable on the nearest sofa and go fast asleep. He hated gloves and refused to wear them even in the coldest weather. He disliked automobiles intensely and refused ever to ride in one. Jigsaw puzzles became his “narcotic,” but never satisfied with those to be found in stores, which he considered much too easy, he had his specially made, from large photographs or reproductions of paintings, each puzzle with a thousand to three thousand pieces.
He wrote his correspondence on anything at hand—a scrap of cheap note paper, the back of an old invitation, some stray bit of Emily’s stationery found in a bottom drawer. His handwriting, again as perfect as copperplate, was so small that most of his aged friends were unable to read it without a magnifying glass.
When out on his walks he was known to step into a gateway or to appear suddenly fascinated by the contents of a store window if he thought he could avoid a conversation. The standard explanation locally was that the Roeblings were all a little odd that way, but the fact was that talking was often physically painful for him. Strangers were constantly stopping him on the street. Often a mother or father with a small boy in tow would ask if the boy might shake his hand and years later these same boys would remember him as “a nice, courteous old gentleman.” Among beggars and other Trenton people interested in charity he was known as a soft touch.
There seems to have never been a day of his life in all the years following the bridge when he did not know some kind of physical discomfort or outright pain. Privately, like old men everywhere, he was preoccupied with his health, as well as material possessions he no longer had any use for.
Nature remained his solace. He had planted a grove of Siberian crab apples behind the house. “Four have agreed to bloom one year,” he wrote, “and four the next year. How good they are.” He had also acquired a new companion, a rather disreputable-looking Airedale, a stray he named “Billy Sunday.” It became a common thing to see them come down the long drive as he set off on a walk, a small, fragile old gentleman in pinstripes and boater, advancing slowly, stiffly, the dog trailing at his heels. Or they would stand together in front of his tall iron gate waiting for the trolley. There was no regular stop there but the trolley stopped just the same and dog and master would climb aboard, everybody inside watching. As was widely known, Billy Sunday was the one dog in Trenton with a special pass to ride free on the trolleys. Once Roebling was seated, Billy would slip between his legs and curl up under the seat.
Ferdinand Roebling died in 1917 and Charles the year after. Karl G. Roebling, Ferdinand’s oldest son, was named head of John A. Roebling’s Sons. But three years later Karl dropped dead on a golf course. Within days it was decided that there was only one person left who could possibly take charge of the vast industrial empire.
The New York and Brooklyn papers made much of the announcement. “A little old soldier of eighty-four, Col. Washington A. Roebling, the man who built Brooklyn Bridge and the son of the man who planned it, is fighting today his last fight,” wrote the New York World, “is fighting to get his work done in spite of all his enemies—illness, debility, pain, loneliness, bereavement, the terrible depression of the man who has outlived his generation.”
Roebling ran the company for the next five years and the business prospered exceedingly. “I claim a small part of this as the result of my management,” he confided to his son. Others credited him with more than a small part.
He got up each morning at about seven thirty, had his breakfast, then, like the men in the mill, took the trolley to work, accompanied by his dog. His day was the full eight hours, the same as everyone. He had no secretary, preferring to handle his correspondence himself, which he wrote always in longhand. He was all but blind in one eye, almost totally deaf, and weighed perhaps 120 pounds. He looked so frail, so very old, like Lee in his final photographs, with the same snow-white beard and sunken eyes, that people wondered how in the world he could possibly manage, knowing, as most everybody did, what he had been through in his life. But the extraordinary thing is he did not simply manage. He was highly innovative, forceful, and seemed to know absolutely all there was to know about every facet of the business. He decided to change all the mills over to electric power, instead of steam, a momentous and costly move. An entirely new department for the electrolytic galvanizing of wire was set up under his direction and the contract for the cables of the Bear Mountain Bridge, over the Hudson River—among other bridges—was taken and completed during the time he was in charge.
In one interview he was asked how he was able to carry on. “Because it’s all in my head,” he answered. “…It’s my job to carry the responsibility and you can’t desert your job. You can’t slink out of life or out of the work life lays on you.”
In 1924 at the request of the Butler County Historical Association he sat down and wrote a detailed account of the early days of Saxonburg, and to a correspondent he wrote, “Long ago I ceased my endeavor to clear up the respective identities of myself and my father. Many people think I died in 1869.”
The house next door was sold and torn down. Electric street lights were installed along West State Street. “The Great White Way in Trenton has come our way,” he wrote in despair. “Every 50 ft. will be installed a huge arc lamp to light up the front of the house and keep us from sleeping.” His own downward progress he described as accelerative, like gravity.
In the spring of 1926 it was obvious to every one that he was failing rapidly. By May he was down to less than a hundred pounds. “Think not that I am improving—growing weaker daily—body racks with pain—head bowed down in sheer apathy—bones crack when rolled over—fall down when I try to stand. Please leave me alone—and in peace,” he wrote to John’s wife. But then he added a P.S.: “A surprise: for several years—ten—a night-blooming cereus stalk has been knocked about in the greenhouse. Last night it suddenly bloomed, was brought to my bedside at 10 P.M. A delicate odor filled the room—a wonderful flower—much larger than a rose. A calyx filled with snow-white petals curved outward and oval-pointed. This morning it is gone—to sleep the sleep of ages again.”
He lingered on for two more months. The only thing he had left, he said, was his brain and for that, he added, he was extremely grateful.
He died peacefully at age eighty-nine, on July 21, 1926, with his wife, son, and several others at his bedside. There is no record of any last words being said. The end came at three thirty in the afternoon.
All of the bridges built by John A. Roebling are gone now except two—the Cincinnati Bridge and an aqueduct over the Delaware built in 1848 above Port Jervis, New York, which has been converted into an automobile bridge and is the oldest suspension bridge in America. His house at Saxonburg still stands, however, as does the church he built there and a small shed in which the first reels of iron wire were stored. John A. Roebling’s Sons has since been sold to the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company.
Washington Roebling’s house on West State Street was offered to the state of New Jersey to be used as the governor’s mansion, but the offer was declined because it was felt that the upkeep would be too costly. The house was torn down in 1946 to make room for a parking lot. The house at 110 Columbia Heights, Brooklyn has also been torn down. His mineral collection, which numbered some sixteen thousand pieces and included all but four of the known minerals on earth, was given by his son to the Smithsonian Institution.
As he had requested, Roebling was buried at Cold Spring, beside Emily. No statues were put up in his honor. The graves were very plainly marked.
In 1948 D. B. Steinman and his New York engineering firm were retained by the city to prepare plans to increase the highway capacity of the Brooklyn Bridge. With some fifty men assigned to the project, an extensive remodeling was carried out over a number of years. The trolley and el tracks were removed, the roadways were widened to three lanes in each direction, and additional trusswork was built. The changes, which cost more than nine million dollars, altered the over-all appearance of the bridge very little.
In 1964 the bridge was officially declared a National Historic Landmark. It now carries more than 121,000 trucks and automobiles a day and on the average Sunday, in good weather, more than a thousand people go walking or bicycling on the promenade, which is still the only one of its kind. There are bronze plaques on both towers, beside the promenade, listing the names of John A. and Washington A. Roebling, the trustees, the assistant engineers, and the master mechanic. The plaques were put up when the bridge was first completed. In the time since, two more plaques, one for each tower, have been added to honor Emily Roebling.
The towers themselves, though long since dwarfed by the skyline of downtown Manhattan, remain unique. Nothing to compare to them has been built in America. Since the towers of the mammoth suspension bridges built in the twentieth century are of steel, the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are both the first and the last monumental stone gateways on the North American continent.
A combined force of some thirty men looks after the bridge. It gets a new coat of paint every five years or so and according to the engineers at the New York Department of Public Works, of all the bridges on the East River, it is the one that gives them the least trouble. With normal maintenance, say the engineers, the bridge will last another hundred years. If parts are replaced from time to time—even entire cables if necessary, which would be perfectly possible—then, “As far as we are concerned, it will last forever.” Perhaps it will.