Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is a historic suspension bridge that spans the East River, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn in New York City. Designed by John A. Roebling and completed in 1883, it was one of the first bridges to use steel-wire cables, revolutionizing bridge engineering. The bridge's iconic design and innovative construction techniques have made it a symbol of American ingenuity and progress.
6 Key excerpts on "Brooklyn Bridge"
eBook - ePubGreat Bridges
From Ancient Times to the Twentieth Century
- Wilbur J. Watson(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...The work was completed by his gifted son, Col. Washington Roebling. This noble structure has a main span of 1595 feet 6 inches, and a clear height above the water of 135 feet, allowing ocean-going vessels to pass underneath. Its decks accommodate two elevated railway tracks, two surface traction tracks, two roadways and one walkway. The cost was about sixteen million dollars. (Plate CXIV.) New York — Williamsburg and Manhattan Bridges Since the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, two other suspension bridges have been built over the East River at New York, known as the Williamsburg Bridge, completed in 1903, and the Manhattan Bridge, completed in 1909. The former has very little to commend from an architectural viewpoint. The staunch stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are paralleled by awkward-looking towers of steel. In the design of the Manhattan Bridge, however, we witness a return to pleasing proportions, made possible by a radical change in the principles of construction, consisting in securing the cables at the tops of the towers, thus doing away with the clumsy saddles, and hinging the tower itself at its base to allow it to rock to and fro with the variations in length and sag of the cables. This change permitted the use of a comparatively slender tower of steel of pleasing form and proportion. No consulting architect was employed on the general design of the Williamsburg Bridge. The Manhattan Bridge has a span of 1470 feet, while the span of the Williamsburg Bridge is 1600 feet, exceeded only by the Philadelphia-Camden Bridge recently completed. Carere and Hastings were consulting architects on the Manhattan Bridge, collaborating with the engineers of the Department of Plant and Structures of the City of New York. (Plates CXV & CXVI.) Engineering of New York Bridges 3 The construction of the great East River Bridges at New York was made possible by the development of modern methods and materials of engineering...
eBook - ePub- Peter Bishop(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Reaktion Books(Publisher)
...It can be placed in the foreground or in the background. Each approach reveals different contexts and meanings. New York Harbour and Brooklyn Bridge c. 1905. The modern bridge While its ancestry is ancient, a certain kind of bridge and bridge-ness emerged around 200 years ago as one of the prime monuments of modernity. Such a prestige was partly due to the sculptural qualities of bridges that were perfect for a conspicuous display of heroic engineering – for fantasies about overcoming nature, mastering new construction materials, displaying daring visions and computational certainties. It was a prestige that also owed much to a revolution in physical movement, on both a local and global scale, a revolution in mobility that was itself integral to modernity – the reliable and efficient circulation of goods, the regulated and rapid mass movement of the population. Such a revolution was also based around the new technologies of transportation and communication – the heroic age of railways in particular, but also the rise of effective roads and of steamships. This radical shift in the meaning, design, purpose and imagining of bridges was simultaneously documented, celebrated and explored through the visual and performing arts, through literary fictions, through a documentary and news media that was radically transformed first by photography and then by cinema, through the newly invented forms of visual reproduction such as postcards, posters and postage stamps. The modern bridge was also represented through an outpouring of new types of bridges and bridging projects, in new possibilities for physical bridges. The Bridge. A night view of Brooklyn Bridge. Londres, a 1930s poster for French railways. The twentieth century saw the golden age of the railway being supplanted first by that of the automobile and then of the aeroplane, forcing yet another re-evaluation of the bridge...
eBook - ePub- Paul E. Cohen, Robert T. Augustyn, Eric W. Sanderson(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Dover Publications(Publisher)
...A later printing at the turn of the century was partially brought up-to-date with the addition of new structures, but the map still included several edifices that had been demolished by the time it was reissued. The most prominent structure on the map is the bridge that created a sensation at the end of the nineteenth century. At the time the Brooklyn Bridge was constructed (1867–83), it was considered a wonder of the world, and its engineer, John Augustus Roebling according to Rudyard Kipling, “the greatest artist of our epoch.” Not only was the bridge the longest ever built up to that time, but its mile-long span joined two of the largest cities in America (Philadelphia was then the second in size; Brooklyn the third). The uniting of Brooklyn and Manhattan, preceded by the annexation of parts of the Bronx in 1874, marked the first steps in creating Greater New York City. The Gait-Hoy Map also delineated the annexed sections of the Bronx. Although the bridge was not completed until 1883, the mapmaker drew it finished and functioning. The colossal scale of the bridge paved the way for other gargantuan structures. High buildings employing iron skeletons were not on the Manhattan landscape until the late 1880s, but by 1875 New York already had two buildings ten stories high: the Western Union Building on lower Broadway and the Tribune Building. Diarist George Templeton Strong described the Tribune Building as towering above the surrounding buildings “like a sort of brick and mortar giraffe.” Elisha Graves Otis’s invention of the “safety hoister” elevator allowed the builders of the 1870s to begin the competition of what Walt Whitman called “heroic cloud touching edifices.” As the business district developed and residential construction steadily moved uptown, an elevated train system connected the various parts of the city...
- Robert Routledge(Author)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...This channel is about ten miles long, and of a varying width, which may average three-quarters of a mile. There are many ferries between the opposite shores, and the waters are busy with steamers, sailing-boats, tugs, and craft of all kinds, engaged either in traffic with ports near at hand, or in trade with distant lands. At the southern end of this strait, near the point of its junction with New York Bay, is the narrowest part of its course, and it is here that it is crossed by the magnificent suspension bridge, known indifferently as the East River Bridge, or Brooklyn Bridge, which provides land communication between New York, with its population of two millions, and Brooklyn, the fourth city of the States in point of size, with inhabitants numbering about one million. Brooklyn is largely a residential place for persons whose daily business is in New York. It has wide, well-planned streets, many shaded by the luxuriant foliage of double rows of trees, and possesses parks, public buildings, institutes, churches, etc., on a scale commensurate with its importance. The central span of Brooklyn Bridge, from tower to tower, is 1,595 feet, and each shore part, extending from the tower to the anchorage of the cables, is 930 feet span, while the two approaches beyond the anchorage together add 2,534 feet to the total length, which is 5,989 feet, or considerably over a mile. The centre span, it will be observed, is much greater than that of the Niagara Falls Clifton Bridge, which was less than one quarter of a mile, whereas the Brooklyn Bridge span extends to something approaching one-third of a mile, or, more exactly, a few yards longer than three-tenths. The width of the Brooklyn is another one of its remarkable features, for this is no less than 85 feet, and includes two roadways for ordinary vehicles, and two tramway tracks, on which the carriages are moved by an endless cable, worked by a stationary engine on the Brooklyn side...
eBook - ePubGreen Gentrification
Urban sustainability and the struggle for environmental justice
- Kenneth Gould, Tammy Lewis(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...In 2002 the state and city, under Governor George Pataki (R) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, signed an agreement to create the Brooklyn Bridge Park Development Corporation with the charge of planning, designing, and building the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Funding was secured through city and state and the project was required to be economically self-sufficient following its construction. “The cost of operation, maintenance and upkeep would be paid out of the revenues received from appropriate commercial activities and residential projects located within the Project” (Brooklyn Bridge Park 2006: 3). There were debates leading up to the park’s construction about how the revenue would be generated. In 2005, neighbors argued against a design that put luxury condos on the site as a means of revenue. Locals argued against the proposal: We want a park we can use, not just look at … It is not a park – it is an exclusive luxury condo development that is publicly inaccessible, but with award-winning landscape! … Why is there this rush to build housing first? … The process caters to residential real estate developers, which is in conflict with the public park values. (Wisloski 2005) In the end, the residential buildings were included. One Brooklyn Bridge Park, a warehouse that was converted into luxury condominiums, opened in 2008. Construction of the park began in 2008 and in 2010 the first section of the park opened. In 2016, construction continues with new areas opening as they become completed. Brooklyn Bridge Park runs along the East River, spanning from just north of the Brooklyn Bridge south, along the waterfront, down through former shipping Piers 1 through 6, ending at the working piers of the Columbia Waterfront on Atlantic Avenue (see Figure 4.1). The park is adjacent to the neighborhoods of DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) and Brooklyn Heights. It spans 1.3 miles of the waterfront and covers eighty-five acres. It is truly an astounding park...
eBook - ePubAsset Management of Bridges
Proceedings of the 9th New York Bridge Conference, August 21-22, 2017, New York City, USA
- Khaled M Mahmoud, Khaled M Mahmoud(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- CRC Press(Publisher)
...When building commenced in 1869, the bridge should have been the culmination—for John Roebling (1806–1869) - of a lifetime spent in the early development of the modern suspension bridge. Within weeks of approval being granted for construction of the bridge, however, John Roebling was dead from a site injury. Responsibility for completing the bridge passed to his son, Washington Roebling (1837–1926), who had already proved his abilities on the Cincinnati Bridge. When completed in 1866 that bridge had, at 1057 ft, the longest span in the world (Dupré 1998). Washington Roebling succumbed to a debilitating illness in 1872 after prolonged exposure to conditions in the pressurised caissons used to sink the tower foundations. Washington’s wife, Emily Warren Roebling (1843–1903), then assumed the role of her husband’s amanuensis. She conveyed his instructions to the assistant engineers at the site, until the bridge was complete (McCullough 1972). 3 THE AMERICAN IMPRESSIONISTS The Australian historian Bernard Smith (1916–2011) has remarked that modern art ‘ developed out of French impressionism ’ (Smith 1992), the origins of which can be traced to the work of Edouard Manet (1832–1883), who commenced his art training in 1850. Ironically, modernity—as a concept that today’s structural engineer can appreciate—commenced around the same time, with the construction of large span railway bridges in wrought iron, designed on the basis of rational, mathematically based analysis and rigorous material testing. These developments were driven by the industrialisation and urbanisation shaking the world, which triggered revolutions in transportation and social mobility (Rothwell 2011) that the French Impressionists sought to convey in new ways of applying paint and using colour. Figure 3...
