Brooklyn Bridge

Brooklyn Bridge

Official name	Brooklyn Bridge
Carries	Motor vehicles, elevated trains (until 1944), streetcars (until 1950), pedestrians, and bicycles
Crosses	East River
Locale	New York City, USA
Maintained by	{{{maint}}}
ID number	{{{id}}}
Design	Suspension
Longest span	1,595 feet (486 m)
Total length	6,016 feet (1,834 m)
Width	85 feet (26 m)
Vertical clearance	{{{clearance}}}
Clearance below	135 feet (41 m) at mid-span
Average Daily Traffic	{{{traffic}}}
Opening date	May 24, 1883
Destruction date	{{{closed}}}
Toll	{{{toll}}}
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The Brooklyn Bridge (originally the New York and Brooklyn Bridge), one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States, stretches 6,016 feet (1,834 m) over the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn. On completion, it was the largest suspension bridge in the world and the first steel-wire suspension bridge.

History

Construction began in 1869. The Brooklyn Bridge was completed fourteen years later and was opened for use on May 24, 1883. On that first day, a total of 1,800 vehicles and 150,300 people crossed. The bridge's main span over the East River is 1,595 feet (486 meters). The bridge cost $18 million to build and approximately 27 people died during its construction. A week after the opening, on May 30, a rumor that the Bridge was going to collapse caused a stampede which crushed twelve people.

At the time it opened, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world — fifty percent longer than any previously built — and has become a treasured landmark. Additionally, for several years the towers were the tallest structures in the Western Hemisphere. Since the 1980s, it has been floodlit at night to display its architectural features. The architecture style is Gothic, with characteristic pointed arches above the passageways through the stone towers.

The bridge was designed by an architectural firm owned by John Augustus Roebling in Trenton, New Jersey. Roebling and his firm had built smaller suspension bridges, such as the John A. Roebling Suspension Bridge in Cincinnati, Ohio and the Waco Suspension Bridge in Waco, Texas, that served as the engineering prototypes for the final design.

As construction was beginning, Roebling's foot was seriously injured in an accident; within a few weeks, he died of tetanus. His son, Washington, succeeded him, but was stricken with caisson disease ( decompression sickness), due to working in compressed air in caissons, in 1872. Washington's wife, Emily Warren Roebling, became his aide, learning engineering and communicating his wishes to the on-site assistants. When the bridge opened, she was the first person to cross it. Washington Roebling rarely visited the site again, actually residing in Trenton, New Jersey, and elsewhere during most of its construction; a famous engraving of him most likely started the rumour of his "watching the construction from afar."

At the time the bridge was built, the aerodynamics of bridge building had not been worked out. Bridges were not tested in wind tunnels until the 1950s - well after the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in the 1940s. It is therefore fortunate that the open truss structure supporting the deck is by its nature less subject to aerodynamic problems. Roebling designed a bridge and truss system that was six times as strong as he thought it needed to be. Because of this, the Brooklyn Bridge is still standing when many of the bridges built around the same time have vanished into history and have been replaced. This is also in spite of the nefarious substitution of inferior quality wire in the cabling supplied by the contractor J. Lloyd Haigh - by the time it was discovered, it was too late to replace the cabling that had already been constructed. Roebling determined that the poorer wire would leave the bridge four rather than six times as strong as necessary, so it was eventually allowed to stand.

At various times, the bridge has carried horses and trolley traffic; at present, it has six lanes for motor vehicles, with a separate walkway along the centerline for pedestrians and bicycles. The two inside traffic lanes once carried elevated trains of the BMT from Brooklyn points to a terminal at Park Row. Streetcars ran on what are now the two center lanes (shared with other traffic) until the elevated lines stopped using the bridge in 1944, when they moved to the protected center tracks. In 1950, the streetcars also stopped running, and the bridge was rebuilt to carry six lanes of automobile traffic.

The BMT bridge tracks were planned to connect to what is now the Nassau Street Line subway at Chambers Street to form part of the never-finished Centre Street Loop.

The bridge was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 17, 1977 and on March 24, 1983 the bridge was designated a National Historic Engineering Landmark.

The construction of the Brooklyn Bridge is accurately detailed in the book The Great Bridge by David McCullough and in the first PBS documentary film ever made by Ken Burns under Florentine Films.

1994 Terrorist Attack

On March 1, 1994, Lebanese-born Rashid Baz opened fire on a van carrying members of the Lubavitch Orthodox-Jewish sect, striking 16-year old student Ari Halberstam. Halberstam died 5 days later from his wounds. Baz was apparently acting out of revenge for the Hebron massacre of 29 Muslims by Baruch Goldstein that had taken place days earlier on February 25, 1994. Baz was convicted of murder and sentenced to a 141-year prison term. After initially classifying the murder as one committed out of road rage, the FBI reclassified the case in 2000 as a terrorist attack. The entrance ramp to the bridge on the Manhattan side was named the Ari Halberstam Memorial Ramp in honor of the victim.

In 2003, truck driver Iyman Faris was sentenced to 20 years in prison for providing material support to al-Qaeda, after an earlier plot to destroy the bridge by cutting through its support wires with blowtorches was cancelled.

A bridge for pedestrians in an age of automobiles

While the bridge has always permitted the passage of pedestrians across its span, its role in allowing thousands to cross took on a special importance in four recent occasions and became a symbol of New Yorkers' coping with a citywide crisis.

There were transit strikes by the Transport Workers Union in 1980 and 2005. The bridge was used by people commuting to work, with Mayors Koch and Bloomberg crossing the bridge to show solidarity with the inconvenienced public.

The bridge was used in 2001 by people in Manhattan to escape the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center after the subway service was suspended, and again on August 14, 2003 when New York City was struck by the 2003 North America blackout which suspended all transit service into and out of Manhattan.

Cultural significance

Contemporaries marvelled at what technology was capable of and the bridge became a symbol of the optimism of the time. John Perry Barlow wrote in the late 20th century of the "literal and genuinely religious leap of faith" embodied in the Brooklyn Bridge . . . the Brooklyn Bridge required of its builders faith in their ability to control technology." [1]

References to "selling the Brooklyn Bridge" abound in American culture, sometimes as examples of rural gullibility but more often in connection with an idea that strains credulity. For example, "If you believe that, I have a wonderful bargain for you . . ."

In his sophomore book The Bridge, Hart Crane begins with a poem entitled "Proem: To Brooklyn Bridge." The bridge was a source of inspiration for Crane and he owned different apartments specifically to have different views of the bridge.

• A TV show called Brooklyn Bridge aired in prime time from 1991 through 1993.

• The Brooklyn Bridge is featured in Disney's Oliver & Company as the bridge itself but with the automobile lanes covered.

• In the 1998 American version of Godzilla, Godzilla attacked the bridge, destroying its second and last towers as well as its train tracks.

• Also in 1998, a tsunami caused by an asteroid crashing into New York Harbor destroyed the bridge in the film Deep Impact.

• The Brooklyn Bridge is featured at the end of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York.

• The bridge is part of the cover of Twin Towers.

• The bridge is featured in SimCity 3000 as the bridge but with opens, and in SimCity 4: Rush Hour as the "Medium Suspension" bridge type for avenues and highways.

• A dramatisation of the challenges faced by the Roebling family during construction of the bridge are portrayed in the BBC documentary series Seven Wonders of the Industrial World.

• The bridge is also featured in the 2004 film Team America: World Police as the bridge itself.

• The bridge played an important part in a scene in Fantastic Four

• The bridge was blown up by Magneto and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants during a recent issue of Ultimate X-Men.

• The Money Song from Monty Python's Flying Circus features the line And my dollar bill could buy the Brooklyn Bridge.