My grandfather spent his whole life in Brooklyn and he loved the place.  His apartment walls were lined with etchings of the city's buildings and landmarks by the now largely forgotten artist Joseph Pennell.  Several times he took us to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge, which we often drove over when we went to visit them from New Jersey.  So I, like David McCullough, and Ken Burns who made a nice film about it, and many New Yorkers, have always loved the Bridge.  In a city which long ago came to be dominated by modernistic skyscrapers, the Bridge is such an obvious throwback, with its stonework, web of steel cables, and gothic arches, it just looks like it has a tale to tell.

In this outstanding book, McCullough tells that tale--of how the bridge came to be built (from 1869 to 1883) and of the extraordinary difficulties, both man-made and natural, that had to be overcome.  The story starts with the post-Civil War social milieu that gave rise to the project and the recognition on the part of the powers that be in Brooklyn that they had to be physically joined to Manhattan to keep pace in the emerging industrial world.  The design for the project and the initial phases of building are largely the product of one unusual man, John Rebelling.  In particular, the structure, much longer than any prior suspension bridge and required to bear significantly greater weight, was made possible by the steel cabling which Roebling himself had perfected.  By contrast, the greatest challenges he faced mostly stemmed from corruption; recall that this was Tammany Hall era New York.

John Roebling was ably assisted by his son Washington, who took over the project when his father died, as a result of a poorly treated injury (the elder Roebling believed in hydrotherapy among his many odd ideas) sustained during construction of the bridge.  Washington was also physically debilitated by his bridge work, one of the many victims of the greatest challenge that he faced : caisson sickness.

If you remember the grade school experiment where you put a tissue in the bottom of a cup, then press the cup (mouth down) to the bottom of a sink full of water, and when you lift out the cup the tissue is still dry, you'll understand the basic concept of the pneumatic caisson.  Huge wooden structures were built and pressed down to the bottom of the East River, air pressure keeping the water from flowing in.  Men worked inside of these caissons, digging out river bottom to get down to bedrock, upon which they intended to moor the arches.  However, when bedrock on one side of the river proved much deeper than predicted they were forced to keep going lower and lower and tremendous difficulty began occurring with men sickening and even dying, from what we now know to be the bends.

Washington Roebling was himself struck down by this condition. He went for years without ever even visiting the Bridge, though he could see it from his apartment window.  But the Roebling family had yet another remarkable builder ready to take over, in this case, his wife.

Between these three formidable characters, and a host of other interesting folks who pop up in the narrative, the bold and enduring design of the Bridge, and the obstacles that had to be tackled, McCullough has all the materials for a thrilling story and he does not disappoint.  If the Brooklyn Bridge was a part of your childhood too, you owe it to yourself to read this book.  Even if you don't care a wit about it, you'll marvel at the Roeblings' accomplishment.  And if you live near Boston and you've grown distraught watching the disastrous Big Dig, you'll wonder where folks like the Roeblings are when we need them.

(Reviewed:05-Apr-01)

Grade: (A+) Orrin C. Judd

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