The Great Bridge (13 page)

It is intriguing to note what Thomas Kinsella said in the
Eagle
the day after the funeral. Possibly his remarks had nothing to do with his feelings about things said on the ride to Jersey City, but then again, possibly, that may have been exactly what he had in mind.

“The great boast of this land,” he wrote, “is twofold—the political works of the [Founding] Fathers, and the material triumphs of science, of which Roebling was, with scarcely any exception, the greatest hero.” But the politician of the present, he went on, was nothing more than “a thing of tricks and dodges.” About all the modern-day politician could do was to undo “the grand creation of former days.” The politician’s words and deeds were as nothing, he said, when compared to the works of a man like John A. Roebling.

“One such life as Roebling’s was worth more than those of a whole convention full of jabbering and wrangling politicians.” Concerning politicians, Kinsella could speak with some authority, his Brooklyn readers knew, for he was one himself.

BROOKLYN
in that high summer of 1869 was still a city quite unto itself, with its own paid fire department, police, schools, and a fierce local pride of a kind usually associated with smaller, less worldly places. It had sprung forth all at once, as suddenly as a mining town, on the western tip of Long Island, in King’s County, New York, its population increasing a hundredfold in less than a lifetime. A man like Henry Cruse Murphy could readily recall when Fulton Street was lined with giant elms and an eccentric Hessian gunsmith named John Valentine Swertcope was free to go prowling about Washington’s old fort on the Heights, popping away at songbirds. For nearly two hundred years, from the time it was first settled by Dutch farmers in the early seventeenth century, Brooklyn had changed hardly at all. At the start of the nineteenth century, when talk of a bridge first began, there had been fewer than five thousand people in the entire county, more than a thousand of whom were not there out of choice, being black slaves. Now there were close to 400,000 people who called Brooklyn home. In the words of one little guidebook, Brooklyn had been “transformed” in a generation “from insignificance into metropolitan importance.”

Brooklyn’s population was still less than half that of New York and among a good many New Yorkers it was regarded as a backwater, a familiar enough neighboring horizon, with its ships and church steeples, a place to go hear Beecher or to be buried at Greenwood perhaps, but a hinterland and scarcely worth mentioning in the same breath with New York. But Brooklyn, in fact, was the third-largest city in America and had been for some time. It was a major manufacturing center—for glass, steel, tinware, marble mantels, hats, buggy whips, chemicals, cordage, whiskey, beer, glue. It was a larger seaport than New York, a larger city than Boston, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and growing faster than any of them—faster even than New York, according to the
Eagle
—even without a bridge.

Already Brooklyn covered an area of twenty-five square miles, which made it larger than the island of Manhattan.

City Hall, with its attendant law offices and chophouses, was the political center of town. The white marble building with Greek columns and new cupola stood on a pie-shaped plot at the juncture of Court, Joralemon, and Fulton Streets, and there, most any day, could be found Brooklyn’s own Commissioners of Water and Sewerage, the Street Commissioner, the City Auditor, the Comptroller, the Keeper of the City Hall, numerous frock-coated aldermen, and the Honorable Martin Kalbfleisch, Mayor, a vain, hard-drinking, foulmouthed little Democrat who would go down in history as “an enigma to the respectable and a delight to the reporter.”

From City Hall, Brooklyn, to City Hall, New York, was less than two miles, but the pulsing salt river between them was a dividing line in more ways than one. The Brooklyn side was still strictly the domain of the Kings County Democrats.

Fulton Street, Old Ferry Road in earlier days, was the business district, Brooklyn’s Broadway, it was said, but really more like its Main Street. From City Hall, Fulton Street sloped off a mile or so to the river, where it ended abruptly and its horsecars made their turnaround in front of the ferryhouse. The
Eagle
had its offices at the foot of Fulton Street, just up from the ferryhouse, as did the
Union,
the Republican paper. The banks and insurance offices were there, along with such up-to-date stores as Ovington Brothers China House or Frederick Loeser’s (ladies’ wear and “trimmings”).

Unless a person lived on Long Island there was only one way to get to Brooklyn in 1869 and that was by ferry. Fulton Ferry was the one people meant when they talked of the Brooklyn ferry; it was the “Gateway to Brooklyn” and the one Whitman immortalized in his poem. But it was only one of five different lines, all operated by the Union Ferry Company, each of which had its own slips and ferryhouse and was named after its destination on the New York side. (South Ferry ran from the foot of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn to South Street at the tip of Manhattan, for example. The Wall Street Ferry departed at the foot of Montague Street and Fulton Ferry ran from Fulton Street, Brooklyn, to Fulton Street, New York.) In all, thirteen boats were kept steaming back and forth, night and day, making something over a thousand crossings in twenty-four hours. They had names like
Mineola, Montauk, Clinton,
and
Winona
and were 150 and 170 feet or more in length, double-ended, and about six hundred tons on the average.

“What are these huge castles rushing madly across the East River?” wrote a visiting Englishman. “Let us cross in the
Montauk
from Fulton Ferry [to Brooklyn] and survey the freight. There are fourteen carriages, and the passengers are countless—at least 600. Onward she darts at headlong speed, until, apparently in perilous proximity to her wharf, a frightful collision appears inevitable. The impatient Yankees press—each to be the first to jump ashore. The loud ‘twong’ of a bell is suddenly heard; the powerful engine is quickly reversed, and the way of the vessel is so instantaneously stopped that the dense mass of passengers insensibly leans forward from the sudden check.”

Once a ferry had landed and its passengers were ashore, the loading gates at the ferryhouse swung open and the waiting room emptied with a sudden rush of clerks and shop girls, day laborers with dinner pails, butchers, storekeepers, delivery boys, bankers, and business people. Outside, the street swarmed with more crowds coming and going, with vendors, dock workers, carriages, carts, farm wagons, and the clanging Fulton Street horsecars. It had been a long time now since the ferry captains and ticket boys knew their regular passengers by sight. One New Yorker who visited Brooklyn and went away quite impressed by the place also commented that he would just as soon stay in New York if living in Brooklyn meant riding on an East River ferry.

Upstream from the ferry slip and the spot where the colossal bridge tower was to rise were the Catherine Street Ferry; the Navy Yard, at Wallabout Bay; the Havemeyers and Elders sugar refinery, which on foggy mornings looked like a great Rhenish castle at the water’s edge; the Roosevelt Street Ferry; and Brooklyn’s famous old shipyards. Henry Steer’s and Webb & Bell were builders of clipper ships before the war. At Samuel Sneeden’s the Swedish genius Ericsson had built the
Monitor.

Generally speaking, the East River was considered the best part of the harbor of New York. It had deeper water for wharves than along the Hudson, or North River, as it was also known; it was less affected by prevailing winds, a little less troubled by ice. It was also the safest, most desirable place to build or repair ships and for this reason the Roebling bridge was still a bone of contention along the river. With the yards on the New York side taken into account, the shores of the East River represented one of the greatest concentrations of shipbuilding anywhere on earth.

Downstream from the ferry the waterfront ran beneath the brow of the Heights, on past Red Hook Point, clear around to Gowanus Bay. All told Brooklyn had nearly eight miles of piers, dry docks, grain elevators, and warehouses. The new Atlantic Basin, on Buttermilk Channel, was forty acres in area. More ships tied up in Brooklyn now than in New York and Hoboken combined. From the river the city looked as though it were enclosed behind a protective screen of ship masts and rigging. The sea lanes of the world ended at Brooklyn, an admirer of the city would write years later, but it was as true in 1869, and it was the sea, as much as anything, that gave the place its tone and distinction. Gulls wheeled and cried over the housetops. Sailors mingled with the evening crowds along Fulton Street. The salt air, reputedly, was “pure and bracing…wafted from a thousand miles seaward.”

From half a dozen different high points, from Prospect Park, for example, or from Greenwood Cemetery, the world opened up in all directions and to the south was the Atlantic breaking on the shores of Coney Island. Brooklyn, it was claimed, offered “the most majestic views of land and ocean, with panoramic changes more varied and beautiful than any to be found within the boundaries of any city on this continent,” and apparently that was no exaggeration.

Certainly the view from the Heights was as fine as anything on the eastern seaboard—a sparkling blue and green sweep of 180 degrees, taking in river, bay, Manhattan, the Jersey hills, Staten Island. There were ships everywhere one looked, making for port, heading out to sea. On any summer day in 1869, when the age of sail and the age of steam still overlapped, river and harbor were a ceaseless pageant. New York was the principal reason for most all of it, of course, but Brooklyn had the view.

Old engravings of New York harbor generally show the boats all out of scale, too big, that is, but the shape and nature of the various species represented are a great deal clearer that way and the over-all effect considerably more enjoyable. To judge from such views, there must have been few places on earth where a city dweller could drink in quite so much space and sky or see so much going on that was so everlastingly interesting to watch. The water is filled with schooners, packets, pleasure yachts, gleaming white excursion steamers the size of hotels, and giant iron-hulled, ocean-going sailer-steamers like the new
City of Brooklyn,
the latest and largest ship on the Inman Line. (At a banquet served on board the
City of Brooklyn
that spring, at the end of her maiden voyage, the spirit of good fellowship was such, reportedly, that Beecher broke bread with the Democrats.) Freight-car lighters, hay barges, sand barges, countless steam tugs move back and forth, up and down the river, and everywhere, cutting between them, sidling off crab fashion against the tide, are the Brooklyn ferries.

It was a prospect to cleanse the spirit, no doubt, to put things back in proper balance at the end of a long business day. From such a vantage point, New York was clearly not all there was to life on earth. Even the ferries looked like nothing more than clever toys, perfect in every detail, down to the feathers of coal smoke trailing from each funnel. After dark, with their colored lights, they gave the river “a gala appearance.”

A perfectly healthful place in all seasons and in all respects, Hezekiah Pierrepont had said of these gentle bluffs on the river, the heaped-up leavings of the last of the glaciers. The salt air filled the lungs, and to the rear stretched Long Island, a hundred miles of open country. An enterprising brewer with large cedar-dotted holdings on the Heights, Pierrepont, fifty years before, had advertised lots “for families who may desire to associate in forming
a select neighborhood and circle of society, for a summer’s residence, or a whole year
…” Gentlemen whose business or profession required “their daily attendance in the city” could not do better, he said. His lots were 25 by 100 feet, many fronting on the river, others on “spacious streets 60 feet wide.” By 1869 shade trees made green canopies over red brick sidewalks, upon which fronted some of the stateliest houses in America. As neighborhoods went, there was nothing in New York to compare to it. The Heights had become everything the brewer promised, all that the name implied.

Few in Manhattan could match Willow, Pierrepont, or Clinton Streets, or Columbia Heights, the street running parallel to the river. Built of brick or brownstone, with rows of tall windows, the houses ran “plump out” to the sidewalk, almost without exception. Most of them were quite grand in dimension, beautifully detailed, with marble sills and cast-iron stair rails. Some, such as the Low place on Columbia Heights, were mansions by any man’s standards. But there was little of the flamboyant display soon to characterize Fifth Avenue. No one house seemed designed for the express purpose of upstaging its neighbor. As the
Eagle
observed, “Almost everybody appears to have built his house like somebody else.”

The Heights was the unchallenged social, cultural, and moral center of Brooklyn life, with the social and moral part of things taken the most seriously. It was also, one would gather, about as pleasant and lovely a place to live as there was to be found in urban America, then or since. It was not Brooklyn, but it was very often taken to be.

There on the Heights lived the oldest, wealthiest Brooklyn families—the Pierreponts, the Brevoorts, the Lows; A. S. Barnes, the book and hymnal publisher, with his family of ten children; Simeon Baldwin Chittenden, Moses Beach, Gordon Ford. They were second-generation New Englanders, in the main. They were the people who gave habitually to charity drives and figured on the boards of various Brooklyn institutions. Their names on a directors’ list or an incorporating charter meant eminent respectability. They employed the best cooks, sent their sons to Yale or Columbia. On spring evenings along the shore drive to Fort Hamilton, they could be seen riding with “elegant equipages, well-dressed grooms, and spanking teams.” As it happens, most of them were not around that summer of 1869. They had packed off weeks earlier, as was their custom, moving out en masse nearly—children, servants, steamer trunks, picnic hampers—to Oak Bluffs, Newport, Saratoga, or the White Mountains. All through July and August the
Eagle
carried regular columns to report their doings.