Running with Roebling: the Brooklyn Bridge

I had to stop and ask policemen THREE times.  I could see it and sense its presence, but I had no idea how to get ON the damned thing.

A day earlier, a Saturday, I had been running along the East River.  I love running in New York because there is so much to see.  As a tourist you get the immediacy of walking but you cover so much more territory when you run.  Then, there is the unique information you get by TRAVERSING a neighborhood.  However, if you do not want to stop at every red light, and if you are nowhere near Central Park, your best bet for continuous running are the Rivers.  As I ran and looked out over the expanse of the river, I suddenly saw it.  And I knew that the next day I would run ACROSS the East River on the Brooklyn Bridge.

There is a lot of lore about the Brooklyn Bridge.  When it was built, in the 1880's, it was the longest bridge in the world.  So it was a type of engineering bravado that struck a responsive chord in the heart of Americans and there it has stayed, while even bigger and taller bridges get built around the world.

Part of the Lore has to do with its designer, a German civil engineer named John Roebling.  Calling Roebling an engineer is a little like calling Michael Jordan a pretty good golfer.  (Among Roebling's achievements was writing a treatise on the concept of the Universe under the tutelage of Georg-freaking-Hegel).  He also took a little-known German concept of making rope out of steel wire and founded the Roebling Wire Rope Company which manufactured it for extensive use in this country.                         

Enough.  Except perhaps to mention that Roebling died due to injuries stustained during the Bridge's construction and his son took over the project, descended too deep to a tower's foundation and almost died too!

Roebling designed the bridge like architecture (yet another of his talents).  But he did it with the sensibilities of an engineer.  So while we all love the Golden Gate Bridge for its soaring spire supports, for its lightness (and by the way the span of the Golden Gate Bridge is two and a half times as long as the Brooklyn Bridge!), what we appreciate about the Brooklyn Bridges is its EXPRESSIVENESS.

The suspension bridge derives its elegance from the reduction of material by making sure that all structural members are either in a state of compression or tension (which means, to us lay-folks, that they are either being stretched or crushed, but not BENT).  When the Brooklyn Bridge was designed in the 1800's, STONE was the material of compression and Steel (the wire rope of Roebling) was the material for tension.  The towers of the Brooklyn Bridge are massive stone, granite and limestone, perfect for taking all of that load from the almost-invisible wire cables and carrying it to the ground (which happens to be deep beneath the East River).

Can you imagine what it must have been like to witness the construction of these two massive towers in the middle of the river only to have a gossamer, diaphanous WEB of steel strings connecting them?  Can you imagine the anticipation of the populace to actually walk across that structure... to FLY?

photo by Eugene diSalignac, NYC Municipal archives

It still thrills.  With all of our so-called achievements, our advances, running across the East River on Brooklyn Bridge is one of the spatial highlights of my LIFE.  Once I found the entry point (the police were trying to direct me to a miniscule stairway in some catacomb of structure as a SHORTCUT), the experience could Begin.  It was early Sunday morning.  Very few people out, clear skies and not a lot of noise.

It begins with ascent.  If you are a runner, you know that running uphill is harder than running on the level.... but on the Brooklyn Bridge the ascent exalts the object (the towers) which are distant, mysterious, and elevated.  During this approach, the path changes from concrete to wood and you, the humble pedestrian, start to RISE above the pavement for cars!.  I was a tourist-visitor in New York City for all of six days, but the opening up of the sky from the wonderful closeness of the city was really very welcome.

The sonic shift of running on wood is also welcome.  And the fact you are above the car traffic is a rare position of power.... Horizontal views are unobstructed, you are in control!  But the dominant feature of your travel, the altar, is the stone tower.

Why Roebling chose to depict the tower as a gothic artifact is a mystery to me, but perfect nonetheless.  Gothic architecture is concerned with lightness and soaring in stone, the chamfered corners and diminishing tiers add to the illusion of height.  But it is the gothic arch, the pointed icon of cathedrals, which gives these massive structures their true character.  One arch for Manhattan, the other for Brooklyn: Inbound and Outbound.  Perfect.

Unless you walk on the Bridge, the cables will not mean much to you.  Their pattern, unlike the dark, opaque stone, is more subtle.  Newer suspension bridges use a pattern of vertical cables, but the Brooklyn Bridge adds a layer of diagonal ones, creating a lattice of the web.  And unlike newer bridges, which use two primary cables on each side of the bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge uses four.   A Google tour tells me that Roebling built the bridge six times as strong as he estimated it needed to be.  The diagonal cables were a redundancy to make up for things like wind-tunnel testing, which he, of course had no access to.  The extra pair of primary cables might be considered a redundancy too, except for the pattern of the gothic piers which provided a center support and thus allowed all the cables to be smaller......  But, in fact, at the walkway scale, those redundant diagonal cables and extra pair flanking the walkway are sublime for the foot-traveller.  Viewed along its access, the space defined by the  wood walkway is magnificent in its narrowness, like a beacon of light showing you the Way.

Such was my run.  I read now that the total length of the bridge, including the two sloping approaches is about one mile.... Across and Back plus getting to and from my apartment made the total run about four miles, into Brooklyn, past City Hall, through Chinatown, Little Italy and back again to the luxury of a fifth-floor soho loft apartment, where I sit in air-conditioned splendor and ponder.

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   Brooklyn Bridge, 2007