Piecework

They certainly did. As I grew older, I came increasingly to see The Bridge as a monument to craft. It was New York’s supreme example of the Well-Made Thing. All around us in the sixties, the standards of craft eroded. As aestheticians proclaimed the virtues of the spontaneous, or exalted the bold gesture, or condemned form as an artistic strait jacket, I would cross The Bridge and wonder what they could mean. More than twenty men were killed in the construction of this thing, and others were ruined for life by accidents and disease suffered in its service. To those men, carelessness meant death, not simply for themselves, but for the human beings who would use what they were making. So they had no choice: They had to make it to last. And in doing so, in caring about detail and function and strength, they saw craft triumph into art.

They needed all the craft they possessed, and some that they didn’t: Many of the techniques they used were made up along the way. The undertaking was more formidable than any job of engineering ever before attempted in North America. The span over the water is 1,595 feet 6 inches long, and it is 85 feet wide. Each of the four main cables is 3,578 feet 6 inches long and contains 5,434 wires. The cables are capable of supporting 24,621,780 pounds each, and in the years since construction they have carried trolley cars, subway trains, and hundreds of thousands of automobiles with no strain.

Such a structure was not made simply to be looked at; The Bridge was made to be used. Before it could be anything else, it had to fulfill its primary function: the easing of travel for thousands of people across a river. But inevitably that journey became for some people a heavier rite of passage. If you grew up in Brooklyn, The Bridge could be a symbol of escape; sooner or later, the time arrived when some people had to make the crossing in a decisive way. At the other end was the dream of art, or music, or the theater. Many of us were drawn to law schools or the Police Academy or the vast treasures of the university libraries; some simply fled to freedom from the smothering safety of a family. I remember going over The Bridge to Whitehall Street to be sworn into the navy, three of us squandering our last civilian dollars on a cab. I made the fatal mistake of looking back, and carried The Bridge with me all through boot camp. Others enlisted in the armies of business and camped for life in the skyscrapers to the left of The Bridge. A few fled wives or lovers, the church or the Mob.

Few of us knew the history of the building of The Bridge, that saga that began with John Roebling’s letter to the New York Tribune in 1857 (suggesting “a wire suspension bridge crossing the East River by one single span at such an elevation as will not impede the navigation”) and ended with fireworks, giddy editorials, and an opening-day parade of politicians, bankers, civic leaders, and thieves, led by President Chester Alan Arthur.

No moviemaker, novelist, or comic-book artist could have invented John and Washington Roebling, father and son, the dreamer and the engineer. The father came from Germany, where he had been a friend of Hegel’s, and attempted various Utopian schemes before becoming a manufacturer of steel wire and the man who dreamed the dream of The Bridge. He was dead by 1869, felled by tetanus after his foot was crushed by a ferry while he surveyed the site of the towers. The son took over, and, despite a crippling bout with caisson disease, Washington Roebling soldiered on, commanding his brilliant engineering staff and an army of more than a thousand workers from his house at no Columbia Heights, checking the progress of the construction with a telescope.

The story was rife with treachery and cynicism, peopled by rogues like William Marcy Tweed, the blue-eyed, 300-pound “Boss,” sitting in the corrupt splendor of Tammany Hall, holding up construction until someone arrived from Brooklyn with $60,000 in a carpetbag, to be spread among the members of the Board of Aldermen. More typical was Abram Hewitt, a dapper little congressman whose act was so slick it conned even Henry Adams. Acting as a spokesman for civic purity, he manipulated a ruling that forbade the Roebling-family firm to manufacture wire for use in the four main cables of The Bridge. Enter a bigamist and thief named J. Lloyd Haig, who got a large part of the wire business, secretly kicking back money to Hewitt. Eventually Haig was caught providing defective wire for The Bridge.