1870 It took thirteen years to build, but when it was done it spanned more than a mile over the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, then the longest suspension bridge in the world and the first to be held up by filaments of steel wire.
Even before the bridge was started, the idea of crossing that stretch of water had fascinated the poet Walt Whitman as an image of links between work and home, between fellow voyagers, even between the poet and his future readers. This is from ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1860):
I too saw the reflection of the summer night in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Looked at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the water,
Looked on the haze on the hills southward and south westward,
Looked on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet.
But it took the bridge to bring technology into the optimistic future vision, in the aesthetics of the machine age. Precisionist painters like Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella and George Ault rendered factories, skyscrapers and grain elevators almost cubistically – as simplified planes of light and colour. In two paintings by Stella and a film photographed by Sheeler and Paul Stand (Manhatta, 1920) the Bridge is imaged head-on, its suspension cables focusing on the arches of its pillars.
Not just painting but poetry too had to accommodate the commonplace present – and especially modern industrial technology. ‘For unless poetry can absorb the machine,’ Hart Crane wrote in 1929, it will have ‘failed of its full contemporary function.’ Crane’s ambitious sequence The Bridge (1930) both begins and ends with the Brooklyn Bridge, imagining it as the first link westwards and backwards in time to an American past to be recuperated for use in the present.
O sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.