How one exceptional New Yorker saved the day…and the Brooklyn Bridge.
LOVE STORY
Emily Warren came of age in the mid-19th century, at a time when women were denied the right to vote and were taught that they were best suited to a life of homemaking. Growing up in Cold Spring, New York, Emily was the eleventh of 12 children. She was particularly close to her older brother Gouverneur, and when their father died in 1859, Gouverneur became responsible for the 16-year-old Emily. A Civil War hero and an engineer who advocated education, Gouverneur made sure Emily studied math and science—subjects usually reserved for men.
In 1864 Gouverneur invited his little sister to a military ball, where she met Washington Roebling, one of Gouverneur’s aides. Emily and Washington hit it off immediately, and within a year, they’d married. From the start, the couple broke the social rules of the day by declaring themselves partners and equals. Washington encouraged Emily’s enthusiasm for learning and helped her study civil engineering so that she could understand his work, building suspension bridges.
FOLLOWING IN FATHER’S FOOTSTEPS
Washington’s father, John Roebling, manufactured wire cables. These cables, strung from high towers, were used to support the roadways of suspension bridges. After the Civil War, Washington helped his father build the Cincinnati Bridge, which still spans the Ohio River. Then, in 1868, Washington and Emily traveled to Europe, studying suspension bridges there that were built on caissons.
Constructed deep underwater, caissons were airtight chambers that formed solid foundations to build on. When built on caissons, a suspension bridge tower—even a heavy one—could rise high out of the water. The towers were central to John Roebling’s newest and most ambitious project: He wanted to build a bridge with two stone towers more than 300 feet high supporting a 1,595-foot span. He planned to use the structure to connect Manhattan and Brooklyn across the East River.
BRIDGE TO DISASTERS
Washington Roebling started out as his father’s assistant, but one day, while the elder Roebling was out surveying the location for one of the towers, he suffered a freak accident that crushed his foot. Tetanus set in, and before construction on the bridge could even begin, John died. His grieving son took over as chief engineer. Construction finally began on January 3, 1870.
As the great stone towers of the bridge began to take shape, Washington often worked underwater inside the caissons that supported them. The caissons were an engineering marvel, but working inside them was a dangerous job. Many of the men who toiled inside the chambers contracted an illness called “caisson disease,” which brought on joint pain, itchy skin, vision problems, headaches, paralysis, and other debilitating symptoms. Today the ailment is known as “decompression sickness” or “the bends.” It occurs when a body is exposed to a severe change in barometric pressure—like flying at high altitudes in an unpressurized plane, scuba diving, or working inside a caisson many feet underwater. The changes in air pressure cause dissolved nitrogen in the blood to turn into bubbles, which then circulate and damage a variety of organs.
Decompression sickness can now be treated with time in an oxygen chamber, but in the mid-1800s, there was no effective treatment. So by 1872, Washington Roebling, stricken with caisson disease, was paralyzed and bedridden. His business partners and workers assumed he’d bow out of the project or let another bridge-builder finish the job. Instead, he maintained his position and appointed his 29-year-old wife, Emily, to be his eyes and ears at the worksite.
STEPPING IN
The Brooklyn Bridge was the longest suspension bridge ever built, and it came with enormous engineering challenges. The caisson on the Brooklyn side, for example, rested firmly on bedrock 45 feet below the water’s surface, but on the Manhattan side, workers dug down more than 70 feet below the surface and still couldn’t find solid rock to support the caisson. Digging finally stopped at 78 feet, both because it was so dangerous for the workers (the deeper they went, the more likely a cave-in or other Washington Roebling decided that the immense weight of the Manhattan stone tower would hold the caisson in place even if the caisson didn’t rest on solid rock. More problems arose during the project, but Washington believed Emily could handle the herculean task.
Most career minutes played by a member of the Knicks: 37,586 (Patrick Ewing).
And handle it she did. Besides caring for her bedridden husband and the couple’s young son, she kept business and financial records on the project. She also studied civil engineering, including how to test materials to gauge their strength and safety, and how to make suspension cables that could safely support a bridge deck and the traffic moving across it. Thanks to her studies, when Emily showed up at the bridge site each day, she could direct construction and take accurate notes on any technological or practical problems. Then she went home and relayed the information to her husband, who remained bedridden.
TROUBLED WATERS
Building the bridge took 11 more years, and as the work progressed, Emily’s knowledge and confidence grew. She dealt with contractors, assistant engineers, city officials, and politicians, some of whom worried that the bridge was taking too long to build and costing too much money—$15 million, or about $320 million today. Some of the city officials and politicians wanted to replace the sickly Washington, complaining that all the back-and-forth between the man and his wife was slowing down construction even further. So, in 1882, it fell to Emily to convince them that her husband should keep his job.
That was how Emily Roebling became the first woman to give a speech before the American Society of Civil Engineers, founded in New York in 1852. She argued that Washington should remain chief engineer, reminding the engineers of the enormous problems he’d solved and that his work was essential to the project’s completion. Emily so impressed the group that Washington kept his position…although by then, many people believed that it was really Emily Roebling running the show.
HAIL TO THE CHIEF
May 24, 1883, was the Brooklyn Bridge’s official opening day, and Emily Roebling—in an open carriage—was the first person to cross it. Abram Hewitt (who became mayor of New York in 1886) delivered a famous speech, pointing out that the new bridge was “an everlasting monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of a woman and of her capacity for that higher education from which she has been too long disbarred.” Emily’s bridge had not only connected Manhattan and Brooklyn, but it also had helped change opinions about what women could achieve. Today Emily Roebling is recognized as America’s first female civil engineer.
The interlocking “NY” logo used on Yankees caps first appeared in 1877 on a medal created to honor John McDowell, the first police officer shot in the line of duty.
Street art has come a long way since the 1980s, when gangs began tagging their territories in New York City’s subways, storefronts, and just about anything they could put their spray cans to. But what was once a symbol of tough turf and unsavory characters has evolved into a legitimate art scene.
New York has become a favorite canvas for guerrilla artists because it provides a venue where their work can be seen by many people, especially those who might not typically venture into a gallery. It’s also a way for them to make political statements or even brighten up city blocks that are otherwise considered “dumps.”
These days, graffiti artists like Banksy, Shepard Fairey, and Nick Walker have become so popular that people from all around the world come to New York and other cities to see their work. In February 2011, fans of Nick Walker stood in line overnight to buy limited edition prints of his mural The Morning After: New York, painted on the side of a building at 35 Cooper Square in the East Village. The mural depicts a silhouetted man in a rowboat in New York Harbor looking at the city’s skyline, which is dripping with graffiti paint. The building where the mural is painted is scheduled to be torn down…taking the mural with it and showing fans just how fleeting graffiti art can be.
Unlike Walker, some muralists prefer to keep their identities a secret. Technically, street art is still graffiti and illegal. The mysterious British artist Banksy even stayed away from the 2011 Academy Awards (where a movie he directed, Exit through the Gift Shop, was nominated) to make sure he wouldn’t be arrested for previous acts of vandalism.