Brooklyn Bridge

The man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge never saw a single cable strung. In June 1869, while surveying the site, John Roebling had his foot crushed against a piling by an approaching ferry. He refused amputation, treated the wound himself with a water cure of his own devising, and died of tetanus three weeks later — leaving the project to his 32-year-old son, Washington, before construction had properly begun.

Washington's ordeal turned out to be slower and stranger. To lay the towers' foundations, workers descended into huge airtight timber boxes called caissons, sunk to the riverbed and kept dry by pumped-in compressed air. Coming back up too fast, men doubled over with joint pain, slurred speech and paralysis — a condition so new doctors named it after the job: caisson disease, what divers now call the bends. Washington pushed himself as hard as his crews and paid for it: in 1872 he surfaced once too quickly and was left partially paralyzed, half-blind and confined to his Brooklyn Heights apartment for most of the next eleven years, watching the towers rise through a telescope from his window.

With Washington unable to visit the site, his wife Emily Warren Roebling became his eyes, hands and voice. She taught herself catenary calculations, stress analysis and masonry construction, briefed contractors, and by the final years was effectively running daily operations — to the point that she was invited to deliver the case for finishing the bridge to a skeptical board of trustees. When it opened in 1883, newspapers credited the engineering to the Roebling men; historians now generally agree that without Emily, it likely would not have been finished as designed.

The bridge's first brush with disaster came six days after opening, when a woman's scream on the crowded footpath triggered a stampede that killed twelve people, feeding rumors the structure was collapsing under the crowd's weight. P. T. Barnum offered the fix a year later: he marched 21 elephants, including his famous Jumbo, across the span in a publicity stunt designed to prove, once and for all, that the bridge could hold.

Getting there

Located in Brooklyn Heights. LaGuardia Airport (LGA) is about 13 km away.