Brooklyn Bridge

You had to know it was coming.

A trip to New York wouldn’t have been complete without me taking, oh, say, 70 to 90 photos of various aspects of the Brooklyn Bridge, and a few had to make their way here.

Before we went to New York I read/skimmed David McCullough’s The Great Bridge. I admit that I was really looking for something between the one-paragraph summary (It was big. It was hard. It took them 14 years.) and the 562 pages of text, 3 pages of vital statistics, 33 pages of notes, 10 pages of bibliography, and 23 pages of index that McCullough provides. But who am I to take issue with a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, a two-time National Book Award winner, and one of America’s greatest living writers, according to the Washington Post?

Howsoever that may be, I had to do The Bridge and did end up seeing it from shore (twice) and from the pedestrian deck, walking across it with 5,000 or so of my closest friends.

It really is a wonderful bridge and an engineering marvel, especially in 1883 when it was completed. It was hard, you know? And it took them 14 years.

From the shore, downtown side

From the shore, uptown side

From the pedestrian deck, looking up

From the pedestrian deck, looking down and back

The whole “uptown/downtown” thing reflects how New Yorkers talk about North and South,and how the subways communicate direction. If the East River were, you know, a river instead of a tidal estuary and if it had a standard direction of flow, we could use more-standard words like “upstream/downstream.” As it is, I decided to follow the “when in Rome” protocol.