And if you believe that, have a bridge to sell you: The expression evokes only one bridge, the Brooklyn. Probably no other bridge has been sold so many times to unsuspecting tourists, proving W. C. Fields's enduring adage that "you can't cheat an honest man." (Early in the twentieth century, at least two con men, William McCloundy and George Parker, were sentenced to Sing Sing for selling the bridge, an even more potentially profitable purchase before tolls were abolished in 1911.)
Whatever designs confidence men had on the bridge and its neo-Gothic granite towers, it had been envisioned by urban planners and civic leaders for decades. The culmination of political and mechanical engineering feats, when it finally opened on May 24, 1883, it linked two separate cities--New York and Brooklyn (then the fourth largest behind New York, Chicago, and Philadelphia) - and would speed the consolidation of Greater New York into a single city fifteen years later. Each city's ambivalence about the link was reflected in the original evenhanded names: the New York and Brooklyn Bridge and the East River Bridge. But city officials formally named it for Brooklyn in 1915, two years after the adjacent Manhattan Bridge was completed.
The bridge was designed by John Roebling, but his fatal injuries left constructon in the hands of his son, Washington, and Washington's wife, Emily. Construction took fourteen years, involved six hundred workers daily, and cost $15 million (over $360 million in today's dollars). Its main span stretching 1,595.5 feet, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, until it was overtaken by the Williamsburg Bridge in 1903. A few days after it opened, a stampede precipitated by a panic that it might collapse led to the death of at least twelve people. A year later, P. T. Barnum scotched doubts about the bridge's durability by leading Jumbo and twenty other elephants across the span.
Originally, a central elevated walkway for pedestrians was flanked by roadways for horse-drawn traffic, streetcars, and elevated trains between Sands Street in Brooklyn and Park Row in Manhattan. Just ten days before the formal opening, bridge trustees imposed fares of one cent for people on foot, five cents for railway passengers, and rates that ranged from two cents for a sheep to ten cents for a horse and wagon. Tolls were abolished in 1911 by Mayor William J. Gaynor, who declared, “I see no more reason for toll gates on the bridges than for toll gates on Fifth Avenue or Broadway.”
On an average weekday, the bridge now carries about 120,000 vehicles and thousands more pedestrians. "When the Brooklyn Bridge was opened," Mayor George B. McClellan, Ir., declared two decades later, “Greater New York was born.”
TEXT FROM SAM ROBERTS 101 OBJECTS
