The Great Bridge (14 page)

The heads of such families generally worked in New York, in banking, dry goods, “the China trade.” Some owned the ships that tied up beneath their windows. A few were also men of learning. J. Carson Brevoort, to give just one example, had been educated in Europe and served for a time as private secretary to Washington Irving. He was a recognized authority on American history and entomology. “His knowledge of fish,” it is reported on good authority, “was hardly exceeded by any naturalist and his collection of books and specimens was magnificent and valuable.”

Among such men and in such a setting, New Yorkers of comparable station might well wish to make their home once the bridge was built and the inconvenience of the ferries was no longer an issue.

At Clinton and Pierrepont stood the Brooklyn Club, where, as one visitor noted happily, the members not only referred to one another’s wives on a first-name basis, but their servants as well. Close by were the Mercantile Library, the Long Island Historical Society, and the Music Academy, where the Heights gathered for “uplifting” lectures, amateur theatrical productions and musicals, Johann Strauss on one occasion, and yearly charity balls. In the grand ballroom “one could not move a foot without appearing in mirrors.”

And there, too, on the Heights, stood what was held to be not only the moral and spiritual center of Brooklyn and New York, but of all America. Brooklyn was “The City of Churches,” Talmage and Storrs were among its pastors. But Plymouth Church, a big brick barn of a building on Orange Street, was its foremost institution, bar none, the thing Brooklyn was famous for from one end of the land to the other. For it was there, on an open platform, before a congregation of two thousand or more, that Beecher preached, weekly—except summers—taking the Rocky Mountains as his sounding board, as one man said.

From the photographs there are of Henry Ward Beecher and the volumes of printed sermons, it is a little hard to understand just what all the excitement was about. One eye droops quite noticeably, giving him an unbalanced, slightly unpleasant look. He wore his hair long and loose, as was the custom with many platform spellbinders of the time, and by 1869, at age fifty-six, he was beginning to look a little gray and too well fed. Still, by all accounts, he had a physical vitality, an exuberance that appealed enormously to both men and women. In an age that adored both oratory and showmanship, he was the supreme orator and apparently one of the great performers of all time.

A brilliant pantomimist and mimic, he could turn in an instant from radiant joy to real tears to thundering, righteous anger—whichever was called for. He used no notes and began his sermons very softly, as though holding a private conversation with the front pews. But then all at once the “full, round, sonorous” voice would fill the church. Mark Twain, who watched in awe from the gallery one Sunday, wrote, “He went marching up and down the stage, sawing his arms in the air, hurling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry, and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point.”

America had never produced anything quite like this man. Except possibly for Grant, no one alive was so highly regarded. His sermons were read avidly in the newspapers, and gotten up in book form they outsold the most popular fiction. Sunday-morning ferries to Brooklyn were known as “Beecher boats.” The easiest way to find Plymouth Church from the ferry landing was to follow the crowd.

One could look through the hundreds, the thousands, of speeches and sermons delivered by Beecher during the years the bridge was being planned and built and doubtless find a Beecher quote on the subject. There was little in life he did not have something to say about, and particularly if it was a matter of popular interest. Perhaps, like the merchants on Fulton Street, he envisioned whole new elements of New York society suddenly discovering Brooklyn once the great span arched the river. On Sundays it might even become “Beecher’s Bridge.” Of greater interest, however, is what Brooklyn thought of him, what he meant to Brooklyn.

His name was in the papers almost daily, which suggests people never tired of reading about him—what he had to say on free trade or growing onions or the vagaries of the weather. He was regarded as a master of conversation, when in truth he seems to have been more a master of the monologue. His entrance into any Brooklyn auditorium or public gathering was the immediate signal for an ovation, and the plot he had picked out at Greenwood for himself and his stiff, severe-looking wife was a tourist attraction.

The rich and the famous paid him all kinds of homage—Lincoln once said he was the greatest man in America—and Plymouth Church paid him twenty thousand dollars a year, or the same as the President of the United States received. And nobody thought that out of line. It is perhaps impossible to imagine the hold he had on his time.

“Our institutions live in him,” said the
Eagle,
“our thoughts as a nation breathe in him, our muscular Christianity finds in him the most vigorous champion. He is the Hercules of American Protestantism…”

The presence of such an individual would give a place a certain aura, needless to say, and was certainly a factor in determining the kind of people who had been choosing the Heights as a place to live over the twenty-odd years since Beecher first arrived there—not all of whom, it ought to be said, were excessively wealthy or prominent socially. Perhaps the most fitting description of people on the Heights at the time the bridge was about to be built is one written of the Plymouth Church congregation by a visiting reporter from Massachusetts. “A more intelligent body of people one would rarely find,” he said. “A phrenologist would praise their intellectual developments, while there is a look of cheerful hearty satisfaction on most of their faces, as if they relished life and were seldom troubled with the blues…It is a well-to-do body also; not aristocratic or fashionable, though a score or more came in their carriages, but prudent and prosperous, as if they lived in good houses and both earned and enjoyed worldly comforts.”

There was more to be said for Brooklyn. Gas rates were reasonable. Taxes were still lower than in New York. The schools were far superior. Local government was reputed to be honest, which it was not, but in contrast to the way things were done on the other side of the river, it looked pretty good. Streets were reasonably well lighted after dark and for a city of its size there was little crime. The drinking water was delicious.

The
Eagle,
Brooklyn’s leading daily, was certainly another amenity, and Thomas Kinsella, its editor, who was soon to become a Congressman as well, was regarded as a perfect example of how far a deserving immigrant boy could rise in America.

Jobs happened also to be plentiful in Brooklyn just then. Charles Dickens, after a recent visit, dismissed Brooklyn as “a sort of sleeping place” for New York. But from the statistics available, it appears New York employed considerably less than half of Brooklyn’s wage earners, perhaps even as few as one in three.

In any event, theirs was the fit place to live, most Brooklyn people felt. It was the more truly American city. New York, for all its enticements, was regarded as a monstrous, cold place, overcrowded, overpriced, bewildering—unwholesome. In Brooklyn a clerk could own a home. Of the five hundred miles of streets Brooklyn land speculators liked to exclaim over (“five miles for every one in New York”) only half had anything built on them as yet.

Brooklyn had its shortcomings, of course. Even the best restaurants and shops were second-rate compared to those in New York. The air in the neighborhood of Peter Cooper’s glue factory was not exactly that of the open sea and the average Brooklyn saloon, according to one source, smelled like a kennel. Nor was Brooklyn innocent of the filth and squalor so commonly attributed to “the modern Babel” across the way. The tenements on the “flats,” south of the Navy Yard, where a large part of Brooklyn’s Irish lived, were as foul as any in New York.

But Delmonico’s, Barnum’s museum, evenings at the theater, Wall Street, adventure, all the “delights” of New York were readily available over the river. That, after all, was one of the most appealing things about Brooklyn—it had New York at such easy reach, it offered the best of both worlds.

As for those unpleasant neighborhoods by the Navy Yard, well, most people never ventured down such streets or had any real idea of the life that went on there; and, naturally, what most people believed to be the truth was more important at the time than any latter-day objective appraisal of how things were. People then were still inclined to form opinions more from experience than information and it was the experience of most Brooklyn people that between their city and the other one, there was no comparison.

Moreover, the bridge was going to make things better still. Like most of their countrymen, Brooklyn people, the newcomers especially, were essentially expectant at heart, optimistic, looking forward, believing fervently in the future. How much was already known of the politics the bridge involved, one wonders, or of the various bargains that had been struck? How much was even suspected? How many people had speculated seriously on what the real cost of the bridge might be?

There is a story about where and when the bridge scheme was hatched in Brooklyn and a plaque that commemorates the event, in Owl’s Head Park, near the place where Henry Cruse Murphy’s house once stood.

The winter of 1866-67 was as severe as any on record. Ice conditions on the river were so bad on several occasions that a traveler by train from Albany could reach New York in less time than a commuter from Brooklyn could. Roebling’s bridge had opened in Cincinnati with national acclaim and every Brooklyn paper was demanding a bridge to New York.

Then, on the night of December 21, 1866, young William Kingsley, convinced the time was ripe to get a bridge bill before the Albany legislature, decided to ride down to Bay Ridge to call on Henry Murphy. The night was bitterly cold, no night to be out, according to the story, and Bay Ridge was a good four-mile drive. Kingsley was accompanied by Judge Alexander McCue, a close friend of Murphy’s, who went along, he said later, merely to give Kingsley what support he could, for Murphy then was known to be “far from persuaded of the practicability of the enterprise.”

Kingsley had been conferring since summer with Julius Adams on the engineering involved, and in the library of Murphy’s palatial home, beside a log fire, the conversation went on until past midnight. Murphy is said to have been highly skeptical at first, even hostile to the whole idea of a bridge. Kingsley is supposed to have responded with mounting enthusiasm for his subject, meeting Murphy’s every argument with sharp, convincing rejoinders. Describing the scene later, McCue said of Kingsley, “His unexhausting and unresting mind, matchless in its clarity and invincible in its force, was my wonder and admiration.” After a time Murphy was listening as though under a spell.

By the time they were at the door saying good night, Murphy had been converted. What exactly Kingsley said to him during the course of the evening was never revealed, however. All McCue said was that nobody could have withstood Kingsley’s onslaught of facts and figures.

Possibly the story is true. Possibly Henry Murphy, like earlier patrician figures in Brooklyn, saw the bridge as a threat to a whole way of life. Old General Johnson, Brooklyn’s “first and foremost citizen” when Murphy was a young man, had declared during his campaign for mayor in 1833 that Brooklyn and New York had nothing whatever in common, in “object, interest, or feeling,” and that the river dividing them was a wonderful thing for Brooklyn. During the War of 1812 the general had been put in charge of Fort Greene, to stand in wait for an invasion of Long Island that never materialized. Later he had grown gravely concerned about an invasion of another kind. He liked Brooklyn the way it was, and said so. There were still people who felt that way, not many, but some, and perhaps Murphy was of the same mind.

But it does not seem very likely—if only in light of Murphy’s total, unwavering devotion to the bridge from that night on. Furthermore, nearly ten years before, in 1857, the year of Roebling’s letters in the
Tribune
and
Journal of Commerce,
Murphy said most emphatically that the East River would soon cease to divide Brooklyn and New York. Speaking at a farewell dinner in his honor at the Mansion House, just before leaving for the Netherlands, he had hailed the “spirit of advancement” stirring in Brooklyn and suggested that the new water works was only a sample of the monumental enterprise such a community was capable of. Even the Tammany guests had applauded.

But be that as it may, Kingsley was unquestionably the spearhead of the bridge idea in 1867, and he would have more at stake in the venture ahead than any other one man, with the single, notable exception of Washington Roebling. Kingsley and Murphy were the two most powerful, influential Democrats in Brooklyn—Boss McLaughlin not included—and the Brooklyn Democrats had just about all the political power and influence there was to have in Brooklyn. So whether it was that particular night by the log fire that the two of them struck their bargain is nowhere near so important to the story of the bridge as are the men themselves.

Had a political cartoonist of the time decided to do a simplified illustrated key to Kings County politics, circa 1867, he might have drawn a bird’s-eye view of Brooklyn with Beecher commanding the Heights—just to orient people—and behind Beecher’s back, Boss McLaughlin, looking a little dull-witted, holding City Hall in the palm of his hand. At the foot of Fulton Street, beside an office labeled K
INGSLEY
& K
EENEY
, C
ONTRACTORS
, would be the strapping young Kingsley, energetically cranking a cement mixer that spews out something marked $$$. And down the bay, off to himself, gazing from a tower window at his “villa,” his eyes on some distant horizon and looking very senatorial, would be Henry Murphy, noble as a Roman.