The Epic of New York City (63 page)

Laborers went into action on January 2, 1870, by starting to clear the site in Brooklyn where the bridge's granite and limestone tower would be erected. It took a total of thirteen years and five months to build the Brooklyn Bridge. On December 30, 1873, Alfred E. Smith was born in a four-story tenement at 174 South Street in Manhattan
just below the growing structure. “The bridge and I grew up together,” he said in later years. “I spent a lot of time superintending the job. I have never lost the memory of the admiration and envy I felt for the men swarming up, stringing the cables, putting in the roadways, as the bridge took shape.” As many as 600 workmen were employed on it at the same time, and more than 20 lives were lost before the project was finished. Al Smith added, “I often heard my mother say . . . that if the people of New York had had any idea of the number of human lives sacrificed in the sinking of the caissons for the towers of the Brooklyn bridge, in all probability they would have halted its progress.”

The Brooklyn Bridge was one of the first bridges to use pneumatic caissons for working under water. Sandhogs labored in yellow pine chambers
9½
feet high and about 50 feet square. Lighting was a problem: Calcium lights were expensive, oil lamps were smoky, gas lamps raised the temperature, and even candles were costly. At last 14 calcium lights and 60 gas burners were installed at a cost of $5,000. From time to time fires started, pneumatic chambers blew out, and sandhogs developed the bends.

On July 6, 1869, John Roebling stood on a Brooklyn wharf surveying the locations of the main piers, when his right foot was crushed between an oncoming ferry and the ferry slip. He was rushed to his son's home in Brooklyn Heights, where his toes were amputated without anesthesia. Lockjaw set in, and the great bridge designer died on July 22 at the age of sixty-three.

His thirty-two-year-old son, Washington A. Roebling, had worked with his father a full year before this fatal accident. Himself a graduate engineer, Washington Roebling inherited his father's engineering skill, Germanic thoroughness, courage, and analytical powers, if not all his creative brilliance. One month after his father's death, Washington Roebling was made chief engineer of the project. It now became his passion to complete his father's dream, but in the spring of 1872 the son was carried out of a caisson suffering from the bends. Only thirty-five years old, his days of physical exertion were over, for he was left partially paralyzed and doomed to a lifetime of suffering. Even the mere sound of a human voice was unbearable to him.

The onetime aide had to find his own aide. Fortunately, his wife filled the bill. Emily Warren Roebling was a remarkable woman. Under her husband's guidance she studied engineering, mastered higher mathematics, served as an extension of his brain, and functioned as
field marshal on the construction site. In their Brooklyn Heights home Washington Roebling crouched in a wheelchair at the window, field glasses at hand, to watch from an agonizing distance as the work went on, day by day, month by month, year by year.

At times construction stopped for lack of funds. Then, in 1875, the state legislature took over the project and converted it into a public trust. Thus, two-thirds of the bridge was paid for and owned by the city of Brooklyn, while one-third was paid for and owned by New York City. At long last the formal opening was scheduled for May 24, 1883.

The dedication of the Brooklyn Bridge was an event of national importance. Nearly every state sent representatives, and railroads ran excursion trains from neighboring cities so that thousands of non-New Yorkers might attend. Business was suspended for the day, and schools were closed. Flags fluttered from windows and ships, grandstands were erected on buildings near both ends of the bridge, and tens of thousands of Sunday-clad people thronged toward the grand new structure.

Glorious spring weather crowned the celebration. The sun warmed people perching on fire escapes, glinted from the buttons of marines, and burnished the gray and white uniforms of the “Dandy” Seventh Regiment. Women shielded their coiffures with gay parasols, but the sunlight spun in golden whorls on the tops of men's silk hats whenever they turned their heads. Chester A. Arthur, once collector of the port of New York but now President of the United States, had arrived from Washington with his Cabinet members to take part in the opening of the bridge. The President was suffering from stomach cramps that day, and his muttonchop whiskers quivered a little with pain; but he rallied when he neared the Manhattan approach to the bridge and saw the stupendous crowd. He was accompanied by Grover Cleveland, now die governor of New York, a massive man with a walrus mustache and heavy jowls. With Arthur and Cleveland was New York's bearded and handsome mayor, Franklin Edson. The three dignitaries and other officials walked to the middle of the bridge as cannon roared, sirens shrieked, horns blatted, and a million people cheered. At the center of the bridge they were met by the mayor of Brooklyn, thirty-two-year-old Seth Low, the youngest mayor in Brooklyn's history. Low accepted the bridge in behalf of his community, while Edson accepted it in the name of New York.

Washington Roebling was unable to be there because of his crippled
condition. Tended by his misty-eyed wife, he sat at a window of their Brooklyn Heights home to watch the event through field glasses held in trembling hands. He choked with pride in his accomplishment, and he ached with pain because his father had not lived to share the moment of exultation. Across the sun-flecked river and to the lonely window came the crash of bands and the cries of people. That evening the President of the United States, the governor of New York, and the mayors of New York and Brooklyn, together with other notables, marched to the residence of Washington Roebling to take his hand, bow low, and pay homage to the engineer who had sacrificed his health to build the Brooklyn Bridge.

With the possible exception of the Suez Canal, opened in 1869, the Brooklyn Bridge was the greatest engineering feat in the world since completion of the Erie Canal. It was the first bridge to connect New York and Brooklyn, the first to use steel cables, and the greatest structure to date made of steel, and it had the longest span of any bridge on earth. It inspired more paintings and etchings, novels and short stories, plays and poems, photographs and conversations than any other suspension bridge in the world. Above all, the Brooklyn Bridge made inevitable the consolidation of New York and Brooklyn, thus adding stature to the giant metropolis.

Decoration Day fell six days after the gala opening, and holiday-happy people promenaded across this Eighth Wonder of the World. J. Pierpont Morgan's yacht was being brought out of winter drydock, and ten-year-old Al Smith was playing with boyfriends under the Manhattan end of the bridge. About 4
P.M.
Smith and his pals were dumbfounded when the air began raining coats and hats and parasols and pocketbooks. Craning their necks to look up, they saw a line of struggling people, heard chilling screams, and sensed that panic had broken out.

Newspapers had printed scare stories about the danger of soldiers marching in step across the new bridge; it was believed that their rhythmic tread would set up vibrations capable of destroying the bridge. Someone may have remembered these warnings that Decoration Day as regiments of the national guard marched onto the span, for suddenly there was a shriek of fear. This triggered a stampede among the promenaders. Mad confusion ensued. People tried to run to the shore. They struggled to push past one another. They fought. They clawed. They climbed on top of each other. They throbbed with terror—without knowing why. Bridgeworkers tore out railings on
both sides of the bridge to relieve the pressure, but it was fifteen minutes before the panic was quelled. Twelve persons were trampled to death or pushed off the bridge. In addition to the dozen fatalities, thirty-five people were injured.

After the shock of the disaster had worn off, the bridge became a place of pleasure and recreation. Al Smith doted on singing “Danny by My Side,” whose opening line is “The Brooklyn Bridge on Sunday is known as lovers' lane.”

Chapter 29

T
HE
M
ETROPOLITAN
O
PERA
H
OUSE
was built because of a tiff between titans.

With the growth of capitalism and the expansion of trade after the Civil War a new breed of millionaires was born. The old family-proud aristocrats of New York watched uneasily as the new plutocrats jockeyed for an inside track on the social scene. Bitterness deepened when the new millionaires refused to stay in their places and eat the dust of the old millionaires.

The socially correct place to be seen was in a loge of the ancient Academy of Music on the northeast corner of Fourteenth Street and Irving Place. Since its opening in 1854 the Academy had been the
operatic and cultural center of New York. Snobs felt that they had to attend the Academy, not necessarily to enjoy the music, but to be seen by people who counted. Unfortunately, the shabby old opera house held only eighteen loges, or boxes, and for years these had been sold out by the season to wealthy patrons of time-honored lineage. As a result, the new millionaires had to sit in orchestra seats on the main floor. At performance after performance the old millionaires sneered down on the new breed. The plutocrats tried sneering up at the aristocrats, but sneers, like waterfalls, seem to flow better downhill. The situation finally became unbearable to the lowly seated men, who were now gathering the financial power of the city and nation into their hands.

William Henry Vanderbilt, who liked to boast that he was the richest man in the world, offered $30,000 for one box for the 1880-81 opera season. The Academy's governors haughtily rejected his bid. Vanderbilt refused to put up with this final insult. If he couldn't get what he wanted in the old Academy of Music, he and his friends would build their own opera house. What's more, they planned to make it the most magnificent in the entire world. When news of the decision reached August Belmont, the greatest power at the Academy, he tried to snuff out the cultural revolution by offering to add twenty-six boxes to the Academy for use by the new millionaires, but by then it was too late.

On April 8, 1880, the Metropolitan Opera-house Company, Ltd., was incorporated by Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, the broker Henry Clews, and others. Twenty days later they organized formally and elected J. N. A. Griswold president. The next month they spent $600,000 to buy property bounded by Broadway and Seventh Avenue from Thirty-ninth to Fortieth Street. Let the Academy of Music stay on the fringe of the shopping district, which had reached Fourteenth Street. Vanderbilt and his associates proposed to erect their new opera house within easier reach of upper Fifth Avenue, already blossoming into the city's fashionable residential area.

They chose J. Cleveland Cady as their architect and gave him $430,000 to spend. Although Cady was one of the most prominent architects of the day, he had never designed a theater of any sort; in fact, he is reported to have boasted that he “had never entered a playhouse.” Down to the year 1966 New York opera-goers suffered from his lack of experience, for only half the stage could be seen from certain seats in the “Met.” Cady, however, was not at all confused
about which goose was laying this golden egg. More than anything, the new plutocrats wanted loges from which they could be seen clearly from all sides. Cady gave them more boxes, bigger boxes, and more prominent boxes than those installed in any opera house in history. He also understood that the Met's interior had to be decorated more ostentatiously than even the most luxurious opera houses of Europe. He spent money so freely that patrons had to organize something called the Metropolitan Improvement Company to underwrite completion of the building.