The Brooklyn Bridge (originally New York and Brooklyn Bridge) in New York City is a combination suspension and cable-stayed bridge and one of the oldest suspension bridges of this type in the United States. It spans the East River and connects the boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The bridge now has six lanes and a wide footpath and cycle path on the level above it. At the time of its completion in 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world; it was more than 50 percent longer than any previously built. The Brooklyn Bridge quickly became a new landmark for the city of New York.
The idea of a bridge between Manhattan and Brooklyn had been
discussed since the early 19th century, but always foundered on the East
River, which is not a river but an inlet with strong tidal currents and
heavy shipping traffic. A bridge without disturbing piers, crossing the
estuary far above the ship's masts in a large span, would have been the
ideal solution, but at the time seemed to be beyond all technical
possibilities.
Preparations
The German-American engineer John
Augustus Roebling, who came from Mühlhausen in Thuringia, had already
constructed several suspension bridges and in 1855 completed the Niagara
Falls Suspension Bridge (also a combined suspension and cable-stayed
bridge) with a span of 260 m. He was also the owner of a rope works that
could produce wire ropes from high-strength steel wires. He proposed a
suspension bridge, for which he had already drawn up detailed plans,
including the two large granite towers with the four suspension cables.
The boroughs of New York and Brooklyn reacted cautiously. However,
Roebling was able to get a businessman and newspaper publisher
enthusiastic about the idea, who, after lengthy efforts, succeeded in
getting New York State to legislate for a private company to build a
bridge across the East River. In 1867 the New York Bridge Company was
formed. In 1869 Roebling's plans were approved and he was appointed
chief engineer for the bridge construction.
However, while
inspecting the site designated for one of the towers, Roebling was the
victim of an accident in which his foot was crushed by a ferry. He died
just three weeks later from a tetanus infection. His son Washington then
took over the management of the project.
Actual construction work on the Brooklyn Bridge began on January 3,
1870 with preparations for the foundations of the towers and anchors.
The excavation pits, which were up to 23 m deep, were excavated with the
help of caissons, a method used for the first time in the USA which has
not yet been fully mastered and whose medical problems are not at all
understood. During the five years of civil engineering work, there were
repeated accidents and illnesses. Washington Roebling also fell ill in
1872 while working in one of the caissons for the construction of the
pillar foundations from decompression sickness (diving sickness) or
caisson sickness. As a result, he only had limited ability to speak and
was dependent on a wheelchair. While he was only able to follow the
further construction work with a telescope from home, it was primarily
his wife Emily who pushed the work forward. She would also later be the
first person to cross the bridge after its completion.
In August
1876 the first cable was stretched from one anchor across the towers and
the East River to the other anchor, which was then used to build a
narrow catwalk. Spinning of the suspension cables began in February
1877. The spinning wheels ran back and forth until October 1878 to pull
over 20,000 steel wires across the river for the four suspension cables.
In March 1879, work began on the roadway girders, which lasted another
four years. In addition to the two lanes, two tracks were provided for
the railway. Since their trains had meanwhile become heavier, Roebling
had to provide reinforced struts in the half-timbered construction.
Before the opening, the toll booths at both ends of the bridge had to be
planned and built and the bridge itself had to be equipped with 70
electric lamps.
The total cost was US$15.2 million including
US$3.8 million in land acquisition costs. Overall, the construction
employed 6000 workers, 27 lost their lives.
Opening and first
years
On the day it opened, May 24, 1883, 1,800 vehicles and 150,300
people crossed the new bridge. Five cents per vehicle and one cent per
pedestrian. In order to convince the skeptical New Yorker of the
stability of the structure, the Barnum circus, which had its winter
quarters in Brooklyn, is said to have been sent across the bridge with
21 elephants for a stress test. However, there doesn't seem to be any
reliable source for this. According to some reports, this event took
place a year later.
It is unclear how New Yorkers accepted the
new bridge at the time. It is sometimes said that everyone was
enthusiastic and that hundreds of thousands walked the bridge on the
opening day. According to other reports, the population was initially
very hesitant, so it is said that it took a long time for this caution
to subside.
A few days after the opening, on May 30, panic broke
out in a crowd, killing 12 people. A woman cried out as another lost her
footing while walking up a wooden staircase. Within seconds, mass panic
broke out in the area, during which twelve people died and 35 were
injured, some seriously.
On September 25, 1883, train traffic
began to cross the bridge on the tracks located in the middle between
the carriageways, on both sides of the footpath. At the bridge ends in
Manhattan and Brooklyn, the route was continued as elevated railways to
the nearby terminal stations. In the early years, cable cars commuted
between the two stations, of which 24 vehicles were purchased. These
carriages were pushed out of the terminal stations to the foot of the
ramps by steam locomotives, which were not believed to be able to cope
with the gradients of the ramps. There the carriages were latched onto a
steadily revolving rope, moved by a steam engine on the Brooklyn side.
In 1884 around 9 million passengers were transported, in 1885 the
trains were already running at 90-second intervals during rush hour. In
1893, to increase the capacity in the bridge area, intertwined tracks
were laid and a second traction cable was installed. The use of steam
locomotives ended on November 30, 1896. From then on, electric railcars
brought the trains – now made up of several cars – to the ramps, where
the cable continued to ensure traction. In 1898, following the
unification of the cities of New York and Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Rapid
Transit Company (BRT) took over the New York and Brooklyn Bridge
Railway, connecting the route to their existing ones and running some of
their trains through Manhattan. The steam engine for moving the traction
cable was replaced by electric motors. From 1899, off-peak trains also
ran across the bridge purely electrically, without access to the cable.
In 1898, streetcar service across the Brooklyn Bridge opened. The
tracks were laid out on the left lane of the two lanes next to those of
the cable car.
Around 1900, scammers George C. Parker and William McCloundy
repeatedly sold what they believed to be property that would be used for
new access roads to the bridge to wealthy visitors to the city, who
expected high returns. The story soon circulated in the vernacular that
the two had turned the bridge on to inexperienced strangers themselves.
"Selling the Brooklyn Bridge" has become the dictum in the English
language for any kind of abuse of the good faith of others.
Beginning October 1, 1901, cable traction was restricted to afternoon
rush-hour local trains between the two riverbanks and ceased altogether
on January 27, 1908. In 1944, the subway service on the BRT tracks over
the bridge, which was now part of the New York City Subway, ended, and
from then on the streetcar used the tracks of the former cable car.
Streetcar service across the Brooklyn Bridge was also discontinued in
1954.
Extensive renovation and strengthening measures were
carried out between 1944 and 1955. The tram tracks were recently removed
and the bridge converted to six lanes for motor vehicle traffic. In 1999
the road surface was renewed and a series of reinforcing steel struts
was installed.
In January 1964, the bridge received National
Historic Landmark status. In October 1966, the Brooklyn Bridge was
included in the US National Register of Historic Places, the official
list of sites and structures worthy of protection. On March 24, 1983,
she received the title of a National Historic Civil Engineering
Landmark. To emphasize its outstanding architectural position, the
bridge has been illuminated at night since the 1980s.
21st
century
Since 2009, Brooklyn Bridge Park has been under construction
at the foot of the bridge along the East River. A major renovation of
the bridge also began in 2009 and is ongoing (as of August 2016). After
further damage was discovered during the renovation, the completion of
the renovation work was delayed. Costs of more than 600 million dollars
are expected until the final completion of the redevelopment. The bridge
will remain open during the renovation work, but there are repeated
partial and full closures for vehicle traffic, especially on weekends.
The work was expected to be completed in 2016, but the planned
completion date has now been postponed to 2022.
John Augustus Roebling applied the same basic principles to the
Brooklyn Bridge as to his earlier bridges: the bridge is supported by
massive stone towers. The roadway girder is a box-shaped truss
construction, which in itself already has a high level of rigidity in
order to prevent the dreaded vibrations and twisting during storms. The
roadway girder is not only hung on the suspension cables with vertical
hangers, but also attached to the towers with stay cables. The
dimensions are generous, so that the bridge can also withstand heavy
loads and heavy storms without damage. Though originally designed for
horse-drawn carriages, ox-carts, and the light railroads of the day, the
Brooklyn Bridge later withstood the tremendous increase in road traffic
and pedestrian crowds.
The Brooklyn Bridge has a total length of
1834 m (6016 ft), including the approach ramps, which had to be kept
flat for railroad use. The length between anchors of the suspension
cables is 1068 m (3455 ft 6 in). In the main opening it has a span of
486.3 m and in the two edge openings one of 284.4 m each, resulting in a
total span of 1055.1 m.
The 25.9 m wide road girder, which is
divided into two halves, offers space for a total of six lanes, three in
each direction. Originally there were four lanes and two tracks for
suburban trains on the inner lanes, which were later converted into tram
lines. In 1950 these tracks were also removed. A space in the middle is
not designed as a lane, as it is occupied by the central pylons between
the large portals. In the middle of the level above the lanes there is a
separate crossing for pedestrians and cyclists, which threads through
the portal openings, split into halves. In between, a metal net is
stretched horizontally.
The Brooklyn Bridge has a clear height of
41.15 m (135 ft) in the middle of the slightly upwardly curved roadway
girder. Towards the banks, the clear height decreases to 36.27 m (119
ft) at the pylons.
The two towers with neo-Gothic style elements
are made of granite. Roebling is said to have used the Gothic arched
windows of the Divi Blasii Church in his German birthplace,
Mühlhausen/Thuringia, as a style template. With a height of 48.50 m (159
ft) above the roadway and 84.30 m above the mean high water level, the
towers towered above all buildings of the time except for the spire of
Trinity Church, which was a good meter higher. The foundations of the
towers reach 23.7 m (78 ft) into the ground on the Manhattan side and
13.4 m (44 ft) on the Brooklyn side.
The Brooklyn Bridge was the
first suspension bridge to use steel suspension cables. The four
suspension cables are parallel wire ropes; they each consist of 5,434
steel wires lying parallel to one another, which were first combined in
19 bundles of 286 wires each and then pressed together with large cable
clamps to form the approximately 40 cm thick suspension cables and
sheathed with glowing wire. They were made on-site using Roebling's
patented air-jet spinning process. A total of 1520 hangers made of
normal, laid wire rope are attached to the suspension cables. In
addition, a total of 400 stay cables were stretched between the tower
tops and the roadway girder.
Roebling incorporated a large safety
factor by designing the suspension cable construction for a load six
times higher than required. This paid off especially when it was
discovered during the work that a subcontractor had supplied inferior
wire. These were already installed and could not be removed. However,
since the load-bearing capacity was only reduced to such an extent that
the bridge could still cope with four times the stress, it was left at
that. A total of 24,000 km of wire was used for the ropes.
The
weight of the bridge is approximately 13,300 metric tons (excluding
towers, caissons and anchorages).
Around 120,000 vehicles, 4,000
pedestrians and 3,100 cyclists cross the bridge every day. Use is
restricted to vehicles up to 3.4 m in height and 2.7 t total weight.
The Brooklyn Bridge, along with the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge, is the
focus of the film and musical Saturday Night Fever, both as symbols of
the road to a new world - to a glamorous career instead of dreary work.
The backyard boy from Brooklyn dreams of Manhattan high society. The two
worlds are separated by the East River, but the Brooklyn Bridge connects
them, becoming a place of hope for social advancement.
Katharina
Weingartner has the same motif in her film Sneaker Stories. In addition
to Red Hook in Brooklyn, districts from Vienna and Accra are shown,
where poor young people dream of becoming rich by playing baseball and
then getting lucrative sponsorship from Nike etc. Weingartner contrasts
Red Hook and Manhattan's financial district, they are separated only by
the river: since industrial dismantling ... and the subsequent rise of
black music and sports icons, it has become impassable, and yet the two
districts are symbolically connected: How should it could a youth on
food stamps in Red Hook evade this myth?
The longings in Leslie
Kaplan's novel Brooklyn Bridge run in the opposite direction. For the
main character, the final walk across the bridge represents the dreamed
mental return to childhood, to home.
The Expressionist Robert Müller
wrote the story Brooklyn Bridge in 1920
The American poet Harold
"Hart" Crane was inspired by the Brooklyn Bridge for his poem The Bridge
(1930). Hart Crane lived for some time at 110 Columbia Heights in
Brooklyn, with a good view of the bridge. The builder Washington
Roebling had previously lived at the same address.
In Richard
Crabbe's historical thriller The Brooklyn Supremacy, the Brooklyn Bridge
is at the center of a dramatic period in the city's history.
As one
of the symbols of the city of New York, the Brooklyn Bridge has been the
setting for numerous novels, television shows, films (e.g. Godzilla
[1998], Deep Impact [1998], I Am Legend [2007]) and computer games (e.g.
SimCity 3000).
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns made an
Oscar-nominated 1981 documentary about the making of the Brooklyn
Bridge.
In the summer of 2008, the Brooklyn Bridge itself was part of
a large installation: The New York City Waterfalls was on view from
mid-July to mid-October 2008. Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson
had a budget of $15 million to construct several artificial waterfalls,
including one under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Andreas Feininger created
several photos of the bridge (including, for example: in the fog; at
night) from different perspectives, which are a widespread poster motif.
A rather unknown version, in which the bridge runs horizontally in front
of the high-rise backdrop, serves as the cover image (front and back) of
a Düsseldorf exhibition catalog about Rose Auslander under the title I
fly on the air swing Europe - America - Europe from 1994
On July 22,
2014, two essentially white flags were recovered that unknown persons
had raised on the two pylons instead of the state flags. On August 13,
2014, two Berlin artists, Mischa Leinkauf and Matthias Wermke, claimed
responsibility for this action.