by H. W. Brands
This writer wasn’t alone in believing New York would strangle—or New Yorkers strangle one another—if something wasn’t done to alleviate the city’s transit woes. The rectangular grid of avenues and cross streets was jammed from morning till night; pedestrians took their lives into their hands in simply crossing from one curb to the other. The only solution was to burrow beneath the surface or to rise above it.
Burrowing posed two challenges. The first was the trouble and expense of building a trolley line, railroad, or anything else underground. Costs soared the deeper one dug. The second was the difficulty of ventilating steam engines—the obvious power source—beneath the surface. Steam engines consumed oxygen and emitted carbon monoxide and other toxic gases; operating them underground without asphyxiating passengers tested the ingenuity of the era’s best engineers. An underground railway had recently opened in London, and passengers complained of serious breathing distress.
Alfred Ely Beach proposed an ingenious solution to the ventilation problem. Compressed air, rather than the direct application of steam power, would drive his underground system. Passenger cars fitting snugly inside an iron tube would be whisked from station to station by jets of air pumped into the tube from above ground. Steam engines on the surface, vented to the atmosphere, would whirl the fans that produced the jets.
Beach believed his technology unassailable but reckoned that proponents of competing systems might try to scuttle his project. So he arranged—by methods unclear but apparently in conformance with the practices of Jay Gould, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and other transit magnates of the era—for authorization for his scheme to be slipped into an 1868 state transit bill. Then he surreptitiously commenced construction. His crews started in the basement of a clothing store and bored beneath Broadway, removing the dirt under cover of darkness. By early 1870 Beach’s tube was ready for passengers. These were conducted down a stairway to a station lit with gas lamps and lined with frescoes; awaiting their turn the passengers lounged on upholstered sofas and listened to music performed on a grand piano. They entered a car that seated twenty-two in comparative luxury; when the door was closed the car shot silently and rapidly down the three-hundred-foot length of the tube. Nearly all professed delight at the experience and commended it to their friends. During the next several months some four hundred thousand persons paid twenty-five cents apiece for the “atmospheric ride.”19
But there the experiment ended. Property owners complained that their foundations had been compromised; more tellingly, railroad owners, existing and prospective, mobilized to bar Beach from extending his line into something actually useful. Among those railroaders was a group that hoped to entice Cornelius Vanderbilt into financing a subway. The Commodore’s conservatism had kept him out of surface railroads for years; now it prevented him from backing an underground version, which he considered unworkable. “I shall be underground a damned sight sooner than this thing,” he said.20
He turned out to be right. Though various parties continued to press for underground railroads, the immediate future of mass transit in New York lay overhead. Since just after the Civil War, Charles T. Harvey had lobbied for permission to build an elevated railroad in lower Manhattan. In 1867 the legislature authorized an experimental line running north from Battery Place a half mile along Greenwich Street. The experiment was to determine how disruptive and dangerous an aerial railway was; critics forecast fires from embers that rained down on rooftops, fatal accidents of carriages and omnibuses whose horses were terrified by the mechanical thunder overhead, and the collapse of the towers supporting the tracks and trains. Less spectacular but more pervasive would be the plague of blackened laundry from the belching smokestacks lifted so high.
Harvey mollified some of the critics by employing cables rather than locomotives to propel his cars. The cables ran over pulleys from the cars to a central traction engine. This arrangement kept the sparks and noise to a minimum, but it also complicated the motion of the cars, which at first ran hardly faster than a man could walk. Harvey proclaimed the experiment a success in principle and began raising cash to improve the equipment and service. But his backers fell victim to the Gould-Fisk gold raid of 1869, and by the time the finances were reorganized Harvey no longer controlled the project.
Yet his idea was sound enough that others picked it up. In 1872 the New-York Elevated Railroad Company commenced service up Greenwich and Ninth Avenue to the Hudson River Railroad station on Thirtieth Street. The political future of elevated transit remained precarious, though, and the company felt obliged to circulate among passengers a petition to the state legislature asserting that “the trains have been regular, rapid and safe” and praying that “the road may be continued as a public convenience.” The petition, and perhaps other considerations, had the desired effect. The elevated system survived the legislative scrutiny, and it expanded till it carried more than a million passengers a day.21
AS EXCITING AS the sky trains could be—the new elevated dispensed with Harvey’s cables in favor of regular locomotives, which did throw sparks, spook horses, and occasionally jump the rails—they had nothing on sky bridges. For generations the island character of Manhattan had defined the city of New York, which remained administratively separate from Brooklyn, itself one of the largest cities in America and rapidly growing. To reach New York directly from Brooklyn required taking a boat, catching some spray in the face, and feeling at least a bit of the thrill that inspired Walt Whitman’s ode to the East River ferry:
Flow on, river! flow with the flood-tide, and ebb with the ebb-tide!
Frolic on, crested and scallop-edg’d waves!
Gorgeous clouds of the sun-set! drench with your splendor me, or the men and women generations after me;
Cross from shore to shore, countless crowds of passengers!22
But those crowds grew more countless each year, and the ferries became a bottleneck to the region’s economic growth. Merchants on Manhattan clamored for faster deliveries; industrialists complained that the crowding on the island pushed their wage costs up. Yet it was Brooklyn that really drove the demand for change. Brooklyn’s bakers and brewers wanted easier access to Manhattan’s markets; Brooklyn’s builders sought to house those Manhattan workers; Brooklyn’s land owners lusted after Manhattan’s money.
A bridge would solve everyone’s problems and secure New York’s future. In the half decade after the Civil War, the commerce of the world seemed up for grabs. The Suez Canal drew Atlantic traffic east; the Pacific railroad pulled American traffic west. New Yorkers hoped to command the junction of the two trade routes. “As the great flow of civilization has ever been from East towards the West,” John Augustus Roebling wrote, “with the same certainty will the greatest commercial emporium be located on this continent, which links East to the West, and whose mission it is in the history of mankind to blend the most ancient civilization with the most modern.… Lines of steamers, such as the world never saw before, are now plowing the Atlantic in regular straight line furrows. The same means of communication will unite the western coast of this continent to the eastern coast of Asia. New York will remain the center where these lines meet.”
Roebling was no idle philosopher of history—though he had studied under Hegel in Germany. Born in Saxony to a modestly successful tobacconist and his ambitious wife, young Johann enrolled in the engineering curriculum at the Polytechnic Institute of Berlin, where the great historical philosopher taught. Hegel pondered the trajectory of civilization and determined that America was next in the line of human progress. “It is a land of hope for all who are wearied of the historic armory of old Europe,” he told Roebling and his other students. Roebling took the professor at his word and prepared to emigrate. The Prussian government made difficulties, not liking to lose a bright young man on whom it had lavished educational and technical resources. So Roebling proceeded by stealth, attaching himself to a group of farmers leaving to join their fellow Germans in the Pennsylvania countryside. Roebling la
sted long enough behind the plow to watch his brother, another spurious agrarian, die of sunstroke in a wheat field; safely beyond Bismarck’s border guards, he embraced engineering once more. He built canals and dams, then railroads and aqueducts and bridges. He developed a novel form of rope, fabricated of iron wire; his plant at Trenton churned out miles of the stuff and earned its inventor a fortune.
Roebling hoped to make still more money—not to mention a mark of which his philosophy professor would be proud—by building a bridge connecting Brooklyn to New York. Other engineers preferred a tunnel. Scientific American, lately cofounded by Alfred Beach, the pneumatic man, argued that going underground would save time and money. Roebling dismissed the moles with contempt. A soaring bridge would embody the soaring vision of America. “Let it illustrate the grandeur of our age; let it be the Mecca to which foreign peoples shall come.… Babylon had her hanging gardens, Nineveh her towers, and Rome her Coliseum. Let us have this great monument to progress.”23
And such a bridge! The surging currents of the tidal East River, and the endless stream of ships and boats on its surface, required that any bridge leap the channel in a single span. Only a suspension bridge could accomplish the feat. But no suspension bridge of this size had ever been attempted. The towers to hold the main cables must be hundreds of feet high, to accommodate the sag in the cables and still give the tallest ships clearance. The cables themselves must be stronger than any cables ever spun, and the anchorages to hold the cable ends—to balance the immense weight of the cables and the bridge span—must be embedded deep into the living rock on either side of the bridge. Roebling’s earlier bridges included suspension spans; these made his design for the East River Bridge plausible. But between the plausible and the actual yawned a gap that could swallow millions of dollars and hundreds of lives, perhaps to no ultimate avail. Who would shoulder the risk?
The City of Brooklyn, for one. In the spirit of the legislation that funded the Pacific railroad, the Brooklyn city government voted three million dollars toward Roebling’s project. New York City pitched in a million and a half after several aldermen were bribed and Democratic boss William Tweed received a large ownership stake in the bridge construction company.24
Roebling now turned to making his vision real. But before the work began, a freak accident in the summer of 1869 crushed the toes of his right foot. He consented to amputation, lest his convalescence slow the project. He didn’t move fast enough: tetanus set in, and in three weeks he was dead.
His son assumed the mantle. Washington Roebling lacked his father’s sense of destiny, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute having had no Hegel on staff at the time Washington attended the college in Troy, New York. (Though he didn’t correct people who assumed he had been named for the Father of his Country, the younger Roebling’s forename actually honored a friend of his own father.) Washington continued his training under his father, so that by the time of the elder man’s death, Washington Roebling was the logical person to carry the construction forward.
The construction began with the caissons, the large, watertight, airtight compartments set open-bottomed on the river bed that allowed the workers to excavate for the tower foundations. Cofferdams sufficed for other projects, but such comparatively flimsy structures couldn’t withstand the depths, pressures, and currents of the East River. Caissons had been employed in France (as the name suggested), and James Eads used them in St. Louis, where he was building his bridge across the Mississippi. But they remained a temperamental technology, prone to spectacular failure. The key to the caissons was compressed air, supplied by powerful pumps, that held the water at bay and allowed the workers inside the caissons to carve into the river bed till they reached bedrock. Ingenious air locks enabled the workers to enter and exit the caissons without loss of air pressure; separate locks permitted the removal of the excavated material.
The work was hot, heavy, noisy, and exhausting. The workers—mostly Irish, German, and Italian immigrants—labored around the clock, in eight-hour shifts, six days a week. The excavation went slowly, at times only inches per week. In frustration Washington Roebling authorized the men to blast, and they, in equal frustration, agreed. The decision was fraught with danger; if the concussion didn’t kill the men in the caissons or blow out their eardrums, it might upset the balance between the air pressure and the weight of the overlying water, allowing the water to pour under the sides of the caisson and drown everyone inside. Roebling experimented with a revolver before authorizing serious blasts; when the largest round his gun could fire produced a tolerable concussion, he stepped up to black powder. This spared the men’s lives and hearing, but it filled the caissons with blinding smoke. Roebling solved this new problem by switching to smokeless rifle powder, and the excavation accelerated gratifyingly.
Another difficulty developed as the caissons and men descended into the river bed. The farther down they went, the greater the air pressure required to keep the water out. The men manifested strange symptoms on emerging at the ends of their shifts. They began to bleed from the nose and mouth and suffered inexplicable cramps, which gave rise to the name for their affliction: “the bends.” Shortening the shifts afforded some relief, but not always enough. One man died, then another. The workers struck in protest, demanding still shorter shifts and higher pay: $3.00 for four hours. They held out for a few days, until the company threatened to fire them all and hire replacements. They accepted $2.75 and went back to work.
Meanwhile a doctor hired by the company to investigate the malady found nothing conclusive, and the company sought to suppress the truth about what was killing the workers. A number of decompression deaths were attributed to other causes, including spinal meningitis and “corpulence.” Al Smith, the future mayor of New York, grew up on South Street during this period and recalled his mother’s telling of the agonies of the workers dying from the bends during construction of the bridge. “Perhaps if they had known,” she said, “they would never have built it.” Those workers who exited slowly, returning to normal air pressure gradually, exhibited fewer symptoms, and the doctor recommended this for all the workers. But the company was anxious to finish the excavation, the workers were in a hurry to get home at the ends of their shifts, and his recommendation went largely unheeded. Workers continued to collapse and die.
Roebling, at a loss, finally called the digging to a halt. Though the excavation for the tower on the Brooklyn side had hit bedrock, the New York caisson still rested on sand, seventy-eight feet below high tide in the East River. Roebling decided to risk building the New York tower on the sand, relying on its enormous weight to hold the footing firm against the ebb and flow of the currents.
By contrast to the battle against the river bed and the bends, which took place largely out of sight, the building of the towers occurred in plain view. The Brooklyn tower broke the surface first, followed by the New York tower. Slowly the workers piled the masonry higher, stone upon stone. The Panic of 1873 retarded but didn’t stop the work. In June 1875 the Brooklyn tower topped out, 276 feet above flood tide, and a year later the New York tower achieved the same final height. Cables—not the waist-thick main cables yet but smaller preliminaries—were floated across the river and hoisted into place. In August the first crossing was made by master mechanic Edwin Farrington in a bosun’s chair hung from one of the cables. “The crowds below him held their breath in fearful suspense for a moment,” a local correspondent related, “and then a wild shout went up, showing their appreciation at the boldness of the voyager.… He kissed his hand to the populace in response to their cheers.”25
Spinning the main cables, hanging the suspenders (the vertical lines connecting the main cables to the bridge span), and constructing the span itself took several more years. Not till May 1883 did the bridge open to traffic. When it did, it provoked celebrations like nothing since the end of the Civil War. Brooklyn congratulated itself on reaching the acme of civilization. A large banner paraphrased John Roebling: “Babylon h
ad her hanging gardens, Egypt her Pyramids, Athens her Acropolis, Rome her Coliseum—so Brooklyn has her bridge. Over its broad roadway the teeming millions of the two cities may pass; under its spacious arch the commerce of the world may pass.” Hundreds of thousands turned out from both Brooklyn and New York to commemorate the wonderful day; hundreds of politicians elbowed onto reviewing stands to capture the glory reflected from the cables and girders. Ferryboats and fireboats and lighters and yachts and smacks and scows filled the East River; special trains delivered guests from the suburbs. Nightfall brought “illuminations”—fireworks—that dazzled the multitude and might have ignited the woodwork of the bridge had the fireboats not hosed it down. “A grand line of fire shot up into the air and burst into a shower of golden rain and blue, red, and emerald stars, which dropped gently down into the river,” a witness recorded. “The two towers of the bridge became ablaze with light. Fountains of gold and silver stars were set in motion on the towers, and from the western roadway Japanese shells were fired in rapid succession. These shells soared to a height of about 800 feet and then burst, scattering gold and silver rain, stars of gold, blue, emerald, and red, and writhing serpents which reached the water before their strength was spent.” The grand finale to the show, which consumed fourteen tons of fireworks, was the simultaneous launch of five hundred “monster rockets” that exploded with a force that shook the bridge but, doing no damage, confirmed the consensus that this monument to American greatness would stand forever.26
