The Great Bridge Read Online Free Page A

not to be perfectly horizontal, but would bow gracefully, gently upward. It would pass through the tower arches at an elevation of 119 feet, but at the center it would be 130 feet over the water. This, as Roebling pointed out, was thirty feet higher than the elevation fixed by the British Admiralty for Robert Stephenson’s Britannia Bridge over the Menai Strait, built nearly twenty years earlier. Before long, sailing ships would be things of the past, he declared. His bridge therefore would be no obstruction to navigation, only possibly “an impediment to sailing.” As it was, only the very largest sailing ships afloat would have to trim their topmasts to pass beneath the bridge.
    But because of the great elevation of the river span and the relatively low-lying shores, the rest of the bridge, sloping down to ground level, would have to extend quite far inland on both sides to provide an easy grade. The bridge would have to descend back to earth rather gradually, as it were, and thus the better part of it would be over land, not water. Those inland sections of the bridge between the towers and the two anchorages were known as the land spans, and were also supported by the cables, by suspenders and diagonal stays. The ends of the bridge, from the anchorages down to ground level, were known as the approaches. In all, from one end to the other, the Great Bridge was to measure 5,862 feet, or more than a mile.
    The red line Roebling had drawn on the map ran southeast from City Hall Park, in New York, crossing the river not quite at right angles, at that point where the river was returning to its essentially north-south course. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard—over to the right of the red line—the river turned sharply to the left, heading nearly due west, but then it quickly turned down the map again to merge with the harbor. And it was right there, where the river turned the second time, right about where the Fulton Ferry crossed, that Roebling had put his “Park Line” connecting New York, on the upper left of the map, with Brooklyn, on the lower right.
    The precise terminating point on the New York side was at Chatham Street, opposite the park. This was the place for the bridge to come in, he said. For the next fifty years the park would remain “the great focus of travel, from which speedy communications will ramify in all directions.” From there his red line crossed over North William Street, William, Rose, Vandewater, and half a dozen more streets, to the end of Pier 29, then over the river, straight through one of the Fulton Ferry slips, and into Brooklyn. Running parallel with Fulton Street, Brooklyn’s main thoroughfare, the line cut across a patchwork of narrow cross streets—Water, Dock, Front, James—to Prospect, where it bent slightly toward Fulton, terminating finally in the block bounded by Prospect, Washington, Sands, and Fulton, or right about where St. Ann’s Church stood.
    Down the center of the bridge Roebling planned to run a double pair of tracks to carry specially built trains pulled by an endless cable, which would be powered by a giant stationary steam engine housed out of sight on the Brooklyn side. In time these trains would connect with a system of elevated railroads in both cities and become a lucrative source of revenue. He had worked it all out. His bridge trains would travel at speeds up to forty miles an hour. A one-way trip would take no more than five minutes. It was certain, he said, that forty million passengers a year could be accommodated by such a system, “without confusion and without crowding.”
    Carriages, riders on horseback, drays, farm wagons, commercial traffic of every kind, would cross on either side of the bridge trains, while directly overhead, eighteen feet above the tracks, he would build an elevated boardwalk for pedestrians, providing an uninterrupted view in every direction. This unique feature, he said, would become one of New York’s most popular attractions.