Description
The Brooklyn Bridge was born of an accident that happened a few steps from here. On 28 June 1869, at the Fulton Ferry landing, John A. Roebling, who had just settled its design, had his foot crushed by a ferry; he died of tetanus on 22 July. His son Washington opened the works in January 1870 and led them until caisson disease left him an invalid; his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, then relayed his instructions and took on a large share of the engineering. Some twenty workers lost their lives. On 24 May 1883 the bridge crossed the East River in a single span of 486 metres, the longest of any suspension bridge in the world until 1903, between two granite and limestone towers pierced with pointed arches. It then linked two cities: Brooklyn was not joined to New York until 1898.
The photograph is taken at ground level, behind the wooden fence and wire mesh of the promenade. It stacks two storeys. Above, the deck enters from the corner of the frame, facing the Manhattan tower and the skyscrapers of the island’s southern tip, One World Trade Center first among them. Below, the same scene, turned over in a puddle, darker and denser, like a print pulled in reverse. The heavy sky filters a warm light that gives the whole the tone of an old print. The bridge has often been raised like a gateway: Joseph Stella made it a cathedral of cables in 1919–1920, now at the Yale University Art Gallery; Walker Evans photographed it for the 1930 edition of Hart Crane’s poem The Bridge; Georgia O’Keeffe painted it in 1949, before leaving New York for New Mexico. Here, the reflection brings it back down to the ground.
In 1856, before the bridge, Walt Whitman published the poem that would become “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”. The New York series follows the city through its bridges, its avenues and its rooftops; it begins here, at the bridge’s point of origin.
