Dylan’s Reviews > Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol > Status Update

A week after the opening ceremony on Memorial Day, someone shouted that the bridge was falling and 12 people were trampled to death.

For a great drawing of this event:
"Aftermath of the panic on the bridge, Memorial Day, 1883" Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper

Hewitt's address expressed sympathies for the plight of the working class but cautioned against the spread of political ideologies such as Marxism but championed progress towards labor unions. Hewitt's address was there to implicate the BK bridge as the sole production of the working class. He stated the BK bridge worker wages, $2.50 a day, as to the slave wages for the pyramids of Giza, 2 cents, was progress.

When BK Bridge was opened, very little was said about its utility, but rather ceremonial orators highlighted America's ability to "get things done".

"Moreover, by selling its vast municipal lands in the middle of the 19th century, NY had surrounded its power of self-determination, and turned its destiny over to real-estate operators, to "developers" who measure inches of land in thousands of dollars. Property values prevailed over community values, and "utility" was defined by standards of commerce."

Montgomery Schuyler, an architecture student, criticized the BK Bridge for being a thin marriage of Neo-gothic towers and an explicitly engineered deck that did little to heighten or complement the architectural ornamentation. Schuyler indicted the architects of the contemporary era by noting that engineers were convincingly able to replicate the works of the old masters.

- essay "Brooklyn Bridge as a Monument"

On Brooklyn Bridge. Oil by Albert Gleizes 1917

Abstract painting capturing the geometric and chaotic energy of the bridge.

People were concerned that the increased transit across the BK Bridge would inflate property values in Brooklyn. (1883 btw).

"The bridge would introduce Brooklyn to the amenities ion high culture, and high rents." (pg 113)

BK Bridge was a blend of classical Gothic motifs and advanced architecture that Roebling believed once completed would shift the economic dominance of the world away from Europe to North America by serving as the final link for the Pacific Union railroad; where East meets West. Roebling designed the bridge in the gothic style as its arches are "one of the traditional emblems of man's aspiration for the divine".

"Whoever discover disharmonies of nature, without being able to reconcile them, will discover that the idea of disharmony originated in his own mind, and was only reflected in that which surrounds him. Whatever you wish to perceive you can see ... Here is your Heaven and your Hell, near enough and without any further search far off." John Roebling, architect of the Brooklyn Bridge

"It is significant that [Thomas] Pope did not design his bridge to fit any specific place; it was an invention in the broadest sense, a contrivance to be used wherever a bridge was needed ... Pope's invention represented the "free-born soul" which "breaks the rude and barbarous chains" of academic tradition; it represented America itself."