Brooklyn Bridge

Where it sits. The bridge crosses the East River from Manhattan's Civic Center, beside City Hall Park, to Brooklyn at Cadman Plaza and the edge of Dumbo. It is the southernmost of the five road crossings between Manhattan Island and Long Island, with the Manhattan, Williamsburg, Queensboro and Robert F. Kennedy bridges strung out to the north. Total length is a little under 1,825 metres including approaches; the walk from end to end is about 1.8 kilometres, and most people take forty minutes because they keep stopping.

The story behind it. John Augustus Roebling, a German-born engineer who had already built suspension spans at Niagara and Cincinnati, proposed the crossing in 1857 and was appointed chief engineer a decade later. In June 1869, while surveying, a ferry crushed his foot against a piling; his toes were amputated, he contracted tetanus and died the following month. His 32-year-old son Washington Roebling took over, was himself disabled by decompression sickness contracted in the pressurised caissons, and directed the remaining years of work from his room in Brooklyn Heights. His wife, Emily Warren Roebling, learned catenary mathematics, cable construction and materials science, carried instructions to the site and effectively performed the chief engineer's duties for eleven years. Construction ran from January 1870 to the opening on 24 May 1883.

The engineering, in numbers. The main span measures 1,595.5 feet, or 486.3 metres, between towers, and the deck clears mean high water by 127 feet. The two towers rise 278 feet above the water and are built of limestone, granite quarried on Vinalhaven Island in Maine and shipped down by schooner, and Rosendale cement, pierced by the pointed Gothic Revival arches that make the bridge instantly identifiable. They rest on caissons of southern yellow pine, sunk to 44.5 feet on the Brooklyn side and 78.5 feet on the Manhattan side; the project physician, Andrew Smith, coined the term caisson disease for the illness that struck the men digging inside them. Four main cables, each 15.75 inches thick and spun from 5,282 galvanised steel wires, carry the deck, with diagonal stays running down from the towers in the pattern that gives the bridge its web. It was the first steel-wire suspension bridge in the world and the longest span of its day.

The promenade. Roebling's decision to raise a pedestrian walkway 18 feet above the roadways, rather than pinning it to the side, is why the crossing is a pleasure rather than an ordeal. The iron railings along it were cast by Janes, Kirtland and Company, a Bronx foundry whose other work includes the dome of the United States Capitol and the Bow Bridge in Central Park. Horse cars and elevated trains ran across until 1950. In 2021 a two-way protected bicycle lane was carved out of the Manhattan-bound roadway, which finally separated cyclists from walkers and made the promenade far more comfortable.

On screen — and a correction. The bridge has been destroyed on film more often than it has been used dramatically: it collapses in Cloverfield (2008), is swamped in Deep Impact (1998) and attacked in Godzilla (1998). Its most substantial location sequence is the evacuation flashback in I Am Legend (2007), shot over six nights on the actual structure with hundreds of extras and military vehicles, one of the costliest location shoots the city had then hosted. Kate and Leopold (2001) hinges on a fall from it. Ken Burns made his first film, the Oscar-nominated documentary Brooklyn Bridge, about it in 1981. Two persistent confusions are worth clearing up: the celebrated bridge-and-warehouse image from Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America (1984) is the Manhattan Bridge seen from Washington Street in Dumbo, not this bridge; and the dawn bench shot from Woody Allen's Manhattan (1979) is the Queensboro Bridge from Sutton Place.

Getting there and timing. From Manhattan, take the 4, 5 or 6 to Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall or the J and Z to Chambers Street; the entrance is at the eastern edge of City Hall Park. From Brooklyn, the A and C to High Street or the 2 and 3 to Clark Street put you near the Washington Street and Cadman Plaza entrances. Walking towards Manhattan puts the skyline in front of you; walking towards Brooklyn puts the light behind you in the afternoon. Sunrise is genuinely quiet, midday in summer is shoulder to shoulder, and there is no shade anywhere on the deck.

What to combine it with. The Brooklyn end drops straight into Dumbo and Brooklyn Bridge Park, where the waterfront path runs south past Jane's Carousel and the Empire Stores towards Pier 6 with the whole Manhattan skyline in front of it. On the Manhattan side, City Hall Park, the Woolworth Building of 1913 and the African Burial Ground National Monument are all within three blocks of the ramp. Returning by the East River ferry from the Dumbo landing gives you the bridge from the water, which is the one view the walk itself cannot provide.