Piecework

Above all there were the workingmen and their supervisors, of whom E. F. Farrington, the master mechanic, was the most extraordinary. The workers labored in the horrors of the caissons, far beneath the river, chopping away at mud and rock to provide a solid base for each of the towers; former seamen climbed high among the cables, wrapping them by hand, stringing them with great skill. They were paid $2.25 a day, raised, after a four-day strike, to $2.75. Farrington went everywhere they went, and in 1876, when the first steel rope described its lovely arc from one tower to the other, he became the first man to make the crossing. He was almost 60, and showed up for the momentous day in a linen suit and a straw hat, and when he went out over the river on a boatswain’s chair, all the tugboats in the harbor began to blow their foghorns, and a crowd of 10,000 spectators cheered in amazement, and Farrington took off his hat and waved. By the time he descended into Brooklyn at the end of his historic trip, church bells were ringing and factory whistles screaming in what the Times the next day called “a perfect pandemonium.” That was some America. Those were some men.

Growing up with The Bridge, we never knew this history. David McCullough’s splendid narrative The Great Bridge wasn’t published until 1972. But we knew how important the story had been, because there were still some old-timers around who talked about the “1898 Mistake,” the decision to join Brooklyn to Manhattan as part of Greater New York. That decision had its origins in politics, of course; the old-timers blamed the upstate Republicans, who hoped that Republican Brooklyn joined to Democratic Manhattan would lead to the permanent submersion of Tammany. But Brooklyn, which was an independent city, with its own mayor and government, was so infuriated at the upstate Republicans that it turned almost immediately Democratic and has stayed that way ever since. There was a quality of the fable to all of this, of course, a tale of a lost Arcadia in Brooklyn. But clearly the decision to join the five boroughs into one city was sealed from the day of the opening of The Bridge.

Since we had no true history of The Bridge (in those days in Brooklyn we were taught more about the Tigris and the Euphrates than we were about the city in which we lived), we were forced to see its utility and art. The use of the structure was obvious; it allowed us to cross the city’s most turbulent river, often full of whirlpools and double currents.

But it was also beautiful. That was the thing. And it was beautiful without history, the way a master’s painting of some forgotten duke or king is beautiful quite apart from the facts of the subject’s fame. It seemed baffling and strange that each succeeding New York bridge was uglier or less human than the first. As a young reporter, running around the city to fires and murders, I crossed all of the bridges, large and small; with the possible exception of the George Washington, they were uniformly ugly and graceless, bridges made not for people but for their cars. Only The Bridge seemed made by humans for humans. It was no accident that one day in the late fifties someone began to notice a lone black man out on The Bridge, playing the most aching blues on a saxophone. The man had been a star and then had gone away to find some new thing to make music about. His name was Sonny Rollins. Today I can’t ever cross The Bridge without thinking about him, all alone, accompanied only by the sound of the wind striking the great cabled harp, playing for the gulls and himself. Washington Roebling, who was also an accomplished musician, would have loved that.

Of course, it is the nature of all bridges that they travel in two directions. I know dozens of people who traveled west on The Bridge, wandered the world, and then made the long, wide circle home to Brooklyn. I don’t know anybody who ever did that from the Bronx. From the Manhattan shore, The Bridge still seems to whisper: “Come, travel across me. It’s only 1,562 feet across the river, and over here, and beyond, lies Oz, or Camelot, or Yoknapatawpha County.” And from the Brooklyn side it speaks in plain, bourgeois tones, with a plain, simple message: “Come home.”

When I went home to live in Brooklyn, many things had changed, but The Bridge remained. Every day for years, I would drive across it in the morning and feel that combination of intensity and serenity that Manhattan always evoked. It is in the nature of journalism that no day is like any other; your life’s work is shaped by events. One result is that you come to cherish those things that do not change. They provide stability of place in a world that insists upon altering its look, its cast, and its rules. The Bridge never changed.