The Brooklyn Bridge, New York City

For most of the nineteenth century, the only way to get from Manhattan to Brooklyn was by ferry. That was a problem, because by the 1860s Brooklyn was no longer a village across the river: it was the third-largest city in the United States, growing fast, and its ferries were choked with commuters, carts, and freight. In winter the East River froze and the ferries stopped altogether, stranding thousands. Proposals for a bridge had circulated since the early 1800s, but the river was wide, the currents were fierce, and the harbor below had to stay open to tall-masted ships — any bridge would need a span no one had ever built, with a deck high enough for sailing vessels to pass beneath.

The man who believed it could be done was John Augustus Roebling, a German-born engineer who had already built suspension bridges in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Texas, and who had pioneered the manufacture of wire rope. In 1867 he submitted a design for a bridge across the East River that combined two ideas no one had combined at this scale: a suspension bridge, hung from cables draped over towers, stiffened with diagonal stays radiating from the towers like a cable-stayed bridge. The hybrid design would be far more rigid than a pure suspension bridge, able to carry not only carriages and pedestrians but the heavy elevated trains the planners expected. The main span would measure 1,595.5 feet — half again as long as any suspension bridge then standing — and the deck would sit 127 feet above mean high water, high enough for the tallest ships of the day.

The charter for the bridge was granted in 1867, and Roebling was named chief engineer. He never got to build it. In the summer of 1869, while taking final surveys at the Fulton Ferry slip in Brooklyn, a ferry pinned his foot against a piling, crushing his toes. The toes were amputated, tetanus set in, and Roebling died on July 22, 1869, at the age of 63, before construction had begun. The project passed to his 32-year-old son, Washington Roebling, who had worked beside his father on the bridge at Cincinnati and knew the design intimately.

The first thing anyone notices about the Brooklyn Bridge is its towers. Two of them, one on each side of the river, built of limestone, granite, and Rosendale cement, rising 276.5 feet above high water in pointed neo-Gothic arches. They were the tallest structures in New York when they were built, and they were designed to be beautiful as well as strong: Roebling wanted the towers to read as gateways, great arched portals that a traveler passed through on the way between two cities. The pointed arches above the roadways, the massive stonework, and the sheer verticality of the towers are what make the bridge instantly recognizable in a skyline photograph — the cables and deck could belong to any suspension bridge, but those arches belong to this one.

Building them took years. Each tower stands on a foundation sunk deep into the riverbed, and the masonry rose course by course, stone by stone, with workers laboring on scaffolding hundreds of feet above the water. The Brooklyn tower was finished in June 1875; the Manhattan tower followed thirteen months later. Together the towers anchor the four main cables, each more than fifteen inches thick, made of thousands of individual steel wires spun in place high above the river — a process that took more than two years and required workers to walk the dizzying temporary footbridges strung between the towers, spinning wire strand by strand.

It was the cables that made the bridge possible. The Brooklyn Bridge was the first major suspension bridge to use steel wire rather than iron, and steel gave the cables the strength to carry a span of 1,595.5 feet. Roebling's design also used diagonal stays running from the towers to the deck, an extra measure of stiffness that has kept the bridge standing through more than a century of traffic it was never designed for. The total length of the bridge and its approaches is 6,016 feet — about 1.1 miles from end to end.

The hardest and most dangerous part of the work happened before a single stone of the towers rose above the water. To found the towers, the Roeblings sank enormous wooden caissons — huge bottomless boxes, as large as four city lots — to the bottom of the East River, pumped them full of compressed air to keep the water out, and sent men down inside to dig out the riverbed by hand, by candlelight, in air pressure several times normal. The Brooklyn caisson reached about 44.5 feet below the high-water level; the Manhattan caisson had to go much deeper, about 78.5 feet, because the bedrock on the Manhattan side lay further down.

The men who worked in the caissons — mostly Irish and German immigrants, many of them sandhogs hired by the day — paid a terrible price. Returning too quickly from the pressurized chambers to normal air, nitrogen bubbled out of their blood, causing joint pain, dizziness, paralysis, and death. The condition was barely understood; the project physician, Dr. Andrew Smith, gave it its first name, "caisson disease," now known as decompression sickness, or the bends. Between January and May of 1872 alone, Smith treated 110 cases. When probes under the Manhattan caisson found the bedrock deeper than expected, Washington Roebling halted the foundation short of bedrock rather than risk more lives — a decision the tower has stood on ever since.

Washington Roebling himself was one of the victims. He spent more time inside the caissons than many of his men, and in early 1872, after a long stretch working below, he was struck down by decompression sickness so severely that he was left partially paralyzed and unable to visit the construction site in person. He would never fully recover. For the remaining eleven years of construction, he directed the work from his sickroom in Brooklyn Heights, watching the bridge rise through a telescope from his window and sending instructions to the site.

That is where Emily Warren Roebling enters the story — and where the bridge's history becomes something more than an engineering triumph. Emily had married Washington in 1865, during the Civil War, and she had no formal training in engineering. But as her husband's health failed, she taught herself: mathematics, the strength of materials, cable specifications, the details of the design her father-in-law had drawn and her husband had refined. She became the essential link between the chief engineer in his sickroom and the engineers and foremen on the site, carrying his instructions, relaying their questions back, inspecting the work herself, and settling disputes with a command of the technical detail that won over skeptics who had doubted a woman's place on a construction site.

For eleven years she was, in everything but title, the chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. At the opening ceremony on May 24, 1883, Congressman Abram S. Hewitt praised her publicly as the link between the chief engineer and the construction crew. When the bridge opened, Emily Roebling was the first person to cross it, riding in a carriage with a live rooster in her lap — a traditional symbol of victory. Today the names of all three Roeblings — John A., Washington, and Emily Warren — are inscribed on the bridge as its builders.

The human cost of the bridge is usually given as approximately 27 deaths during construction, from caisson disease, falls, and accidents with heavy machinery; many more workers were left permanently injured. It was a staggering toll, and it is part of why the bridge is remembered not only as a marvel but as a monument to the people who built it.

The Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24, 1883, to one of the great civic celebrations of the nineteenth century. President Chester A. Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland were there, along with tens of thousands of spectators, bands, fireworks, and a flotilla on the river. On that first day, some 150,300 people and 1,800 vehicles crossed what was then the only fixed link between Manhattan and Brooklyn — two cities that would merge into one New York fifteen years later, in 1898, a union the bridge had made inevitable.

Six days after the opening, on May 30, 1883, the celebration turned to tragedy. A rumor spread among the crowds on the bridge that it was going to collapse, and the resulting stampede crushed and killed at least twelve people. The panic revealed an anxious truth: for all its stone and steel, the public was not yet sure the bridge could be trusted.

The man who settled the question was P. T. Barnum. On May 17, 1884, the circus master marched 21 elephants across the bridge, led by his most famous attraction, the giant elephant Jumbo — a publicity stunt for his circus that doubled as a very public load test. If the bridge could hold a parade of elephants, it could hold anything. The elephants crossed without incident, and the doubts, mostly, went with them.

The Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened, and it held that record for twenty years. It was also the first fixed crossing of the East River, and it changed the city it joined: Brooklyn's population surged, its neighborhoods filled with commuters who could now walk to work in Manhattan, and the two cities grew toward each other until consolidation made them one.

The bridge has carried almost every form of transport the city has invented. Horse-drawn carriages and pedestrians came first, then streetcars, then elevated trains, which ran across the bridge until 1944, and streetcars until 1950. Today it carries six lanes of roadway traffic — passenger vehicles only, no trucks — along with the pedestrian promenade and, since September 2021, a two-way protected bicycle path on the roadway level, created by repurposing a lane of vehicle traffic. As of 2024, an average of about 103,000 vehicles, 29,000 pedestrians, and 5,500 cyclists cross the bridge each day, according to the New York City Department of Transportation.

The bridge has been honored accordingly: it was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1964, added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966, designated a New York City Landmark in 1967, and named a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark in 1972. It has been floodlit at night since the 1980s, and its silhouette — the twin Gothic towers, the fan of cables, the long sweep of the deck — has become the single most recognizable image of New York after the skyline itself.

Few structures in America have been photographed, painted, and filmed as often as the Brooklyn Bridge. Hart Crane's long poem "The Bridge" (1930) made it the central symbol of the modern city; Joseph Stella's paintings of the bridge's cables turned it into an icon of American modernism; Walker Evans, Berenice Abbott, and generations of photographers have shot it from every angle. It has starred in films from "It Happened in Brooklyn" to "Moonstruck" and "The French Connection," and it appears in the opening frames of countless television shows set in New York. The bridge is, at this point, not only a piece of infrastructure but a piece of the city's language — the image people reach for when they mean New York.

What keeps it alive in the culture is that it is still, first, a bridge. The photographs are taken by people walking across it, and the walk is the thing itself: free, open to anyone, and more crowded than ever. That is the bridge's real legacy. It was built as a piece of engineering, it became a symbol, and it remains a public street in the sky.

The walk across the Brooklyn Bridge is about 1.1 miles end to end, and it takes most people 25 to 40 minutes at a strolling pace, longer if you stop for photographs — and you will stop. The pedestrian promenade runs down the center of the bridge, elevated 18 feet above the roadway, on a wooden boardwalk that rises gently to the towers and falls again toward the far side. Cyclists now use the separate protected path at roadway level, so the promenade belongs to walkers, though it is crowded on weekends and in good weather, and staying in the pedestrian lane keeps the flow moving.

The classic direction is Manhattan to Brooklyn, starting near City Hall Park and walking toward the Brooklyn tower with the skyline behind you — but the walk rewards either direction. From the Manhattan side, the approach climbs through the arch of the Manhattan tower, and the view opens up: the East River below, the Manhattan Bridge to the north, the Statue of Liberty far to the southwest on a clear day, and the towers of Lower Manhattan rising behind you. Mid-span, the cables frame the skyline the way the bridge's photographers have framed it for a century. On the Brooklyn side, the promenade descends into DUMBO, where Washington Street frames the Manhattan Bridge between brick warehouses, and Brooklyn Bridge Park spreads along the waterfront below the bridge itself — the best place to stand back and look at what you have just walked across.

Go early if you can. The promenade is quietest at sunrise and in the first hour after dawn, when the light is on the towers and the crowds have not yet arrived. Sunset draws the largest crowds, for good reason: the sun drops behind the Manhattan skyline and the bridge's cables go black against the sky. Either way, allow time at both ends — City Hall Park and the Civic Center on the Manhattan side, DUMBO and Brooklyn Bridge Park on the Brooklyn side — because the bridge is best understood as the connection between two neighborhoods, not as a sight on its own. No fixed admission price or opening hour is stated in this article, since none applies: the pedestrian promenade is a public roadway crossing, free to walk at any hour, and no ticket is required. Crowd levels, construction work, and temporary closures change through the year, so check the New York City Department of Transportation's Brooklyn Bridge page before visiting for current conditions.

Address: The Brooklyn Bridge spans the East River between Park Row / Centre Street in Manhattan (near City Hall Park) and Adams Street / Tillary Street in Brooklyn (DUMBO / Brooklyn Heights). Manhattan entrance: Centre Street and Park Row, near City Hall; Brooklyn entrance: Adams Street at Tillary Street, or the staircase near Prospect Street by Cadman Plaza.

Transit: Manhattan side — subway 4/5/6 to Brooklyn Bridge–City Hall, J/Z to Chambers Street, or R/W to City Hall. Brooklyn side — subway A/C to High Street, F to York Street, or 2/3 to Clark Street. Both ends are a short walk from the bridge entrances.

Hours/Admission: No fixed ticket price or opening hour applies — the pedestrian promenade is a free public crossing, open at all hours, with no ticket required. Check the NYC Department of Transportation's Brooklyn Bridge page before visiting for current construction, closures, or crowd advisories.

Best timing: Allow 25–40 minutes to walk across, longer with photo stops. Go early in the morning for the quietest promenade and the best light on the towers, or at sunset for the skyline view. Weekends and good weather are the most crowded. Walk Manhattan to Brooklyn for the classic view, then continue into DUMBO and Brooklyn Bridge Park.