![]() Brooklyn voters agreed to this union by a scant 277 votes, a referendum dubbed the “Great Mistake” by diehards even to this day. It acted as an accelerant to the movement, mostly achieved in 1898, to unite Brooklyn, New York, Queens, Staten Island, and The Bronx into Greater New York, the city of five boroughs that we know today. The Brooklyn Bridge also helped jump-start the consolidation of New York City as the nation’s metropole. It can be argued that the Brooklyn Bridge was the city’s first skyscraper in disguise: its arched pylons rose 276.5 feet, dwarfing most buildings in New York and Brooklyn, except for Richard Upjohn’s Trinity Church, whose spire, also Gothic, bested the Bridge by a scant four and a half feet. ![]() Though these later buildings are much taller, they are surpassed by the Bridge’s majestic and cathedral-like proportions. Bartholdi’s giantess would raise her beckoning torch across the bay just three years after the Bridge was completed, and within the next score of years, a forest of high-rises would be sprouting like sequoias all over lower Manhattan, just south of where the Bridge made landfall on the island. The thrusting span, more than a mile long, was also a bumptious reminder of New York City’s emergence as America’s richest and most populous city, for it was the first of several iconic pieces of urban furniture that would forever define “New York” to the world, the others being the Statue of Liberty framed by a backdrop of soaring skyscrapers. The Bridge was a triumphal mash-up of Gothic sublimity and engineering know-how it was a fertile inspiration to preachers, poets, and painters it was a seductive challenge to daredevils. Fourteen years in the building, the Brooklyn Bridge easily catapulted itself into the ranks of the Seven Wonders of the Industrial Age. It was an audacious project from the start. ![]()
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