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  NYC Walks Blog 33 The Brooklyn Bridge’s Headless Ghost New York City’s most haunted spots will terrify you By Raquel Laneri, Hana R. Alberts and Michael Riedel New York Post 29 October 2017 https://nypost.com/2017/10/28/nycs-most-haunted-spots-will-terrify-you/    

Burns, Ken. Brooklyn Bridge. (Videotape, PBS). Harrod, Kathryn E.  Master Bridge Builders: The Story of the Roeblings. New York: Julian  Messner, Inc., 1958. Inside the Brooklyn Bridge (Videotape, Discovery Channel.) 1999 Kaplan, Leslie.  Brooklyn Bridge. (Fiction). Mann, Elizabeth B. The Brooklyn Bridge. McCullough, David.  The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn…

Construction:  C C        First bridge in the world to be lit by electricity at night. C        First suspension bridge to use galvanized steel wires in its main cables. C        Cincinnati-Covington Bridge, sister of the Brooklyn Bridge, also built by John A. Roebling, opened in 1866, is the only other suspension bridge in the United…

It took thirteen years (1870-1883) to build instead of the promised three; compared to six years it took to build the Transcontinental Railroad (1863-1689). Or the nine years it took Keith Godard to put up the plaques. $15,000,000 instead of the estimated $7,000,000. In today’s money, the Brooklyn Bridge cost more than $1,500,000,000 to build….

This political cartoon celebrating the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge satirizes how the cities of New York and Brooklyn looked at the impact of the bridge.  The Brooklyn newspapers called the opening of the bridge to be a “marriage” between the two cities while the New York newspapers said it was only an “engagement.” Opening…

Once the towers of the Brooklyn Brige were in place, cabling the bridge became a major event. All river traffic stopped. Huge crowds watched as the workers labored to connect the cables across the East River. On August 14, 1876, the first slender wire was strung from tower to tower. The headline in the Brooklyn…

You may ask, who was Emily Roebling? Emily Warren Roebling is the undersung, under-appreciated heroine of the Brooklyn Bridge. Emily was born and raised in the Upper Hudson River Valley at Cold Spring, New York. Although Emily had no formal training, she learned engineering from her brother and from her husband. Emily was fantastic in…

The New York caisson proved even more dangerous. On May 1872 Roebling ordered the digging to stop at a depth of 78 feet 6 inches to avoid further loss of life. By this time, Roebling had suffered his second and most disabling attack of the bends. His eyes, muscles and vocal cords were permanently damaged….

Dredging was completed in the spring of 1870. A caisson, designed by the Roeblings and the largest ever built, was used to build the Brooklyn Tower. Imagine a submarine open at the bottom. It sinks as the mud is dug out through a series of pressure chambers. At the same time, construction of the tower…

Fortunately, his son, Washington Augustus Roebling, was determined not only to follow his father’s plans but was flexible enough to modify them as unanticipated problems occurred.   And in turn, he had the support and the partnership of his wife Emily Warren Roebling. You may ask, who was Washington Augustus Roebling the son? John Augustus Roebling….

You may ask, who was John Augustus Roebling? He was born in Germany in 1806, and from his early youth engineering and bridge-building animated his passions. At the Royal Polytechnic Institute of Berlin, his philosophy professor, Frederick Hegel, recommended that Roebling learn English. As tradition and bureaucracy would prevent Roebling from ever building bridges in Germany,…

You may ask, why was the Brooklyn Bridge built? John Augustus Roebling was the financial, the artistic, and the engineering genius who constructed the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling was a man of action. With the help of his family, he transformed other people’s dreams into reality. How did Roebling come to construct this huge marvel? One…