The Great Bridge (55 page)

And the letter continues on in the same fashion for pages. Twice Emily, who was taking it down, had to sharpen or change her pencil. The letter must have taken a good hour to dictate, perhaps longer considering his condition. Only three words in the whole thing were crossed out. The rest was put down with total certainty and no second thoughts.

On January 8 the Executive Committee held its first meeting of the new year, during which a request from J. Lloyd Haigh was considered. According to the record of the meeting, “Mr. Haigh, the contractor for furnishing the steel wire for the cables, applied to be allowed to substitute the personal obligation of Messrs. Cooper and Hewitt in place of the percentage retained under his contract, amounting now to $29,277, in order to save himself interest upon it.” Mr. Haigh’s proposition was declined. This bit of information appeared in several newspapers the next day, along with a report on various other items taken up at the meeting.

If any of the bridge officials or trustees had been ignorant of Abram Hewitt’s interests in the fortunes of J. Lloyd Haigh and his wireworks, they were no longer. But yet there is nothing in the record to indicate that any of them thought this the least bit out of the ordinary, nor did the papers in either city make any editorial comment on it. Nothing was said either of Haigh’s generally unsavory personal reputation. Abram Hewitt made no comment.

The
Union and Argus
did, however, pick up another item concerning certain legal fees authorized by the committee. “Of course more or less legal information is required by the bridge trustees,” wrote the paper, “It does seem as if there might be something more than coincidence in the twin facts that law costs the bridge $7,500 a month, and that the cheapest establishments at which the article is purveyed are those of E. M. Cullen and H. C. and G. I. Murphy. Inasmuch as H. C. Murphy is the President of the Board, the effect of the figures is an impression that the gentleman in question is overduly given to taking counsel of himself and pays a little highly for his soliloquies.”

H. C. and G. I. Murphy were Henry Murphy’s sons. They were doing as competent a job as could be done and were charging no more for their services than would any other reputable firm, or so said Henry Murphy by way of explanation.

FROM
his window the Chief Engineer watched the wind gather force through the early morning, driving snow almost horizontally and whipping up whitecaps on the river. New York was barely visible. By ten a regular gale was blowing and the effect on the bridge was tremendous. The wind, as he noted in a subsequent report, was up to sixty-five miles per hour. He could see the half-finished cables tossing about wildly, like a child’s skipping rope.

Roebling could pick out tiny dark figures moving up the footbridge from the Brooklyn anchorage and he knew what they were setting out to do, but from where he was he could not hear the sharp clashing of the strands striking against one another or the eerie moaning and whistling of the wires. Down by the bridge the noise was loud enough to be heard for blocks, and the cradle inland from the tower was slamming about so violently that people in houses below were terrified it might snap its lashing and come plunging down on them.

Farrington had detailed a force of men to go out and secure the wires as best as possible. “It was not a pleasant thing for them to contemplate,” according to one account, “and yet there was not a murmur of dissatisfaction.” Carrying the little boatswain’s chairs, they started up the footbridge, moving very slowly, almost bent double against the wind and snow. The bridge was swinging like a pendulum and the slats were sheathed in ice. But by hanging on to the handrail, they were able to keep their feet and eventually reached the tower.

For the next two hours they worked their way up and down the cable strands, lashing them together every fifty feet or so. The wind never let up during that time, and when two or three of them reached the middle of the river span, and caught the full brunt of the wind, it looked as though they might be carried off at any instant, their frail swings tossing about even more than the cable strands.

But they all came back and none of them complained. “Our men deserve credit for the way they do their duty on such occasions as this,” Farrington told a reporter. The bridge itself, he also pointed out, had held up just fine. The footbridge had not lost a single slat.

The storm struck on the last day of January and for the rest of the winter and on into spring the work proceeded without a hitch. The wire spinning was going faster than it had at Cincinnati, as Henry Murphy announced with pleasure, predicting the entire bridge would be finished by 1880.

In February Roebling reported to the trustees on plans for the bridge trains. Everything would be as his father had described it he said. The trains would be hauled by an endless cable, powered by a gigantic steam engine located on the Brooklyn side. “These two tracks, therefore, will be treated exactly like an inclined plane, an operation perfectly simple and perfectly well understood,” his father had written. “There is no novel feature and no experiment involved in its arrangement.” The elder Roebling had proposed an effective running speed of twenty miles per hour, but said that could be stepped up to thirty in the center of the bridge, or even forty, with absolute safety. Each train could have as many as ten cars, with each car fifty feet long and having seats enough for a hundred people. There were to be suspended sliding doors on opposite sides of the cars, one for coming in, the other for going out. These would be worked by conductors. As one train went over to New York, the other would be coming back, just as the carrier wheels worked.

It was possible too that the rope might revolve constantly, and to start or stop, the cars would simply catch on or let go of the rope. “An ingenious arrangement for attaching cars to a moving rope, devised by Col. W. H. Paine, has been successfully at work for more than a year on the Sutter Street Railways in San Francisco,” Roebling informed the trustees. The great virtue of Paine’s grip was that it took hold of the cable in such a way that the car did not start off with a violent jerk. The San Francisco cable car operated with perfect ease, and certainly, as Roebling said, the grades were considerably steeper than those of the East River bridge.

His father’s plans still appeared to be the best possible solution, Roebling said; “and I am now making every arrangement to carry them out substantially as indicated.” This he knew was in direct opposition to what Stranahan and some of the others had been talking about in recent months, and what Kinsella had begun hinting at in the
Eagle.
The scheme was for regular passenger trains on the bridge, linking up with Vanderbilt’s New York Central—so it would be possible to go to sleep in Brooklyn and wake up in Buffalo, as they put it. That Henry Murphy’s Coney Island line might also benefit from such an arrangement had also become a topic of conversation among Brooklyn businessmen.

Roebling explained that the grade of the bridge would be too great for any but heavy locomotives. The bridge had not been designed for such loads, he said. Possibly a narrow-gauge locomotive could be used, drawing a few light cars, but that would cut passenger loads to a sixth of what the cable system could handle. Moreover, according to his calculations, in a storm such as the one of January 31, narrow-gauge cars would blow right over. “Neither, must we overlook the effect of a puffing, snorting locomotive on horses already sufficiently startled by the novelty of a very elevated position,” wrote the engineer.

Kinsella seemed to take all this very graciously. If they had reached the point where all there was to argue about was the size of the doors on the passenger cars, then they had come a long way indeed. That was not the issue, of course, and the issue was still very much alive behind the scenes; but for now an atmosphere of peace settled over the bridge offices and morale among the men actually building the bridge was very high.

Early in March the full-rigged ship U.S.S.
Minnesota,
passing under the center of the bridge, clipped one of the cables with the tip of her topmast. The mast went down with a crash, taking flag and halyards along with it, but the bridge suffered no damage at all. Workmen on the footbridge cheered and waved their hats.

Ever since he returned from Spain Tweed had been telling people he wanted to die. On the morning of April 12, 1878, his wish began to come true.

A few weeks before, on his way from court back to the Ludlow Street Jail, he had caught a cold, which developed into pneumonia, complicated by heart disease. “They will be preaching sermons about me,” he had said. Gray, sunken-cheeked, actually gaunt now, he grew steadily weaker, virtually all alone. According to those few who were at his bedside, he died just as the Essex Market clock struck noon.

There would be some dispute later over just what his last words were. A lawyer who was there claimed Tweed said faintly, “I hope Tilden and Fairchild are satisfied now.” (Charles Fairchild was then the Attorney General of New York.) Some of the newspapers said Tweed had died talking of angels. But a man named S. Foster Dewey, who was Tweed’s secretary and at his bedside, denied this vehemently. “He never thought of angels in his life.” Dewey asserted that Tweed’s final words were these: “I have tried to right some great wrongs. I have been forbearing with those who did not deserve it. I forgive all those who have ever done evil to me, and I want all those whom I have harmed to forgive me.”

It was decided by the family that Tweed would be buried in Brooklyn, at Greenwood Cemetery. “If he had died in 1870,” said one old crony, “Broadway would have been festooned with black, and every military and civil organization in the City would have followed him to Greenwood.” As it was, the funeral was extremely modest indeed, attended by the family, a few friends, and maybe twenty politicians, among whom there was no one of consequence except “Honest John” Kelly. A procession of just eight carriages followed the hearse down Fifth Avenue and then Broadway, to the tip of Manhattan, where they took the Hamilton Avenue Ferry to Brooklyn.

At Greenwood, Tweed was laid to rest by twenty Freemasons, as he had requested, and wearing a white apron of lambskin—“the emblem of innocence.”

“Alas! Alas! young men,” cried the Reverend T. De Witt Talmage from his Brooklyn pulpit the following Sunday, “look at the contrast—in an elegant compartment of a Wagner palace car, surrounded by wine, cards and obsequious attendants, going to his Senatorial place at Albany; then look again at the plain box…behold the low-studded room, looking out upon a mean little dingy court where, a prisoner, exhausted, forsaken, miserable, betrayed, sick, William M. Tweed lies a-dying. From how high up to how low down! Never was such an illustration of the truth that dishonesty will not pay!”

But Godkin in
The Nation
commented, “A villain of more brains would have had a modest dwelling and would have guzzled in secret.” And young Chris Magee, Republican Boss of Pittsburgh, made a special trip to New York to spend several months studying the reasons for Tweed’s downfall and returned home to tell his associates that a ring could be made as safe as a bank, and he would do just that.

Asked by a New York reporter what he thought of Tweed and the part he had played launching Brooklyn’s bridge, the distinguished editor of the Eagle said, “Well, the Brooklyn people have no right to find fault with the Tammany Ring, so far as we are concerned…they favored the bridge project, and always acted fairly and liberally with us.”

On June 14, at about five minutes past twelve noon, people in Tweed’s old neighborhood surrounding the New York anchorage were suddenly startled by what many thought to be the report of a cannon, followed by a loud scraping, hissing noise that sounded, one man said, more like a skyrocket taking off than anything else he had ever heard. A candy vendor on South Street was nearly struck by stones falling about him. A telegraph pole was snapped in two and a chimney was clipped off a nearby house as something went caroming overhead and crashed out of sight over near the bridge tower. People rushed into the streets, including, it was noted in one account, “several harlots” from the Water Street dance halls who supposedly got down on their knees and commenced praying. A bridge cable had snapped, it was said, something had happened to the tower, the whole bridge was coming down, nobody knew what to believe.

Below the north side of the anchorage lay the body of a man, his chest torn open, his back, arms, and legs broken. He was unconscious but still alive. On top of the anchorage a dead man lay sprawled on the stone and two others were lying nearby, groaning pitifully. The only man on the anchorage who had not been hurt, except for a small scratch on one hand, was Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington.

Farrington had been supervising the “easing off” of the sixtieth strand, which had been finished a day or two before. Some thirty men had been working on the anchorage during the morning, but when the noon break came, he had kept only a few of them on to help lower the strand into position. Thomas Blake had been standing where the strand tied onto the shoe, near the pulleys, so he could see that everything went right at that end. Harry Supple and Farrington had been about four paces forward, on either side of the front ends of the anchor bars, at the point where the finished strands for the upstream cable were attached and where the new strand was to take its place. Two other men named McGrath and Arberg were just opposite Blake.

When everything was ready Farrington told Blake to remove the fastenings and the order was passed back to the hoisting engine to begin lowering away. The steel “fall rope” that held the strand began moving through the pulleys and the strand started forward. It had moved about four feet when one of the men cried out that a segment of the fall rope had parted. But the words were no sooner out of his mouth when the whole thing let go. The fall rope had snapped with a deafening report.

It was all over in an instant. Farrington, who had been knocked down by something, but not hurt, looked about to find that only the jagged ends of the fall rope remained. Blake was dead. McGrath and Arberg were bleeding badly and clearly in terrible pain. The remainder of the rope, the pulleys, and the strand had disappeared. And so had Harry Supple.

Blake, it seems, had been killed instantly, struck by the flying shoe more than likely. Supple had been hit by the rope and knocked off the anchorage, falling eighty feet into the yard. The rope had knocked Arberg down and it had caught McGrath by the feet, ripping open the soles of both his shoes, and throwing him as it had Supple, but in the other direction, twenty feet across the top of the stonework.

The strand, and everything it was dragging behind it, had shot away into the air. With one enormous leap it had landed in the bridge yard behind the tower, a good five hundred feet away. Except for the coping on one house, the telephone pole, and the chimney, it had struck nothing in its violent flight and harmed no one. At the bridge yard it had come down on top of a stone pile, shattering some rowboats lying there and barely missing a group of men who were sitting out in the sunshine enjoying their noontime meal. Instantly the great weight of the strand midstream had sent the free end shooting up over the top of the tower. And when the whole strand had gone plummeting into the river, the splash had shot fifty feet in the air and stretched from shore to shore, like a wall suddenly raised up. Passengers on the Fulton Ferry had been drenched, the strand had hit so close by, but nobody was hurt and no boats had been hit.

By the time all the excitement cooled off and it was clear what had happened, everyone realized what a miraculously close call it had been.

Harry Supple, the one who had performed such heroic high-wire feats two summers before, never regained consciousness and died in less than twenty-four hours. Several papers immediately charged that the rope that failed was made of Bessemer steel and that it had been manufactured by the Roeblings. Both claims were true.