A Bridge Over Troubled Waters
In Boca Raton, bridge is a game. In Brooklyn when you talk about bridge you’re talking about history. Some weeks ago, the Eagle ran a reprint from a 1909 edition. It was about the big hullabaloo over the finishing of the Flatbush Avenue extension and its opening up to the just finished Manhattan Bridge.
While never having the acclaim accorded to the Brooklyn Bridge the Manhattan Bridge, the youngest of the three East River spans, was sort of the Murphy’s Law of bridge construction. Let me give you one stunning example. Track was laid across the bridge, first for Trolleys and two and half decades later for the subway. I always found it interesting that even though the train was hundreds of feet above ground it was still the subway. Anyway, it took two sets of geniuses to pull this off. The first was the set that thought of the idea but didn’t think that with all the track on one side of the bridge it might affect its stability, which it did. The bridge would tilt. A bit unnerving, I’d say. The second set had to figure out how to redress that a) without the bridge and all on it ending up in the river and b) not having to tear it down and start again. Last I heard, they succeeded. Now not only does the bridge carry mass transit but it has a second deck. Pretty sturdy, I’d say.
With the completion of the Manhattan Bridge the borough now had three spans that connected different part of Manhattan with different parts of Brooklyn. Why troubled waters? It seems that depending on the bridge it was either opposed by the folks in Manhattan, who thought three portholes from Brooklyn into the hoity-toity borough of Manhattan were at times three too many, or two too many. Then there were the stalwart German and Dutch farmers who looked down on Manhattanites as Manhattanites looked down on them. To them the time-honored system of barge ferries for trade between the two boroughs was “just fine thank you very much.” One of the enduring lies that came and went with each bridge and later the tunnels was that when the tolls paid for the construction the use of the infrastructure would be free. What’s the old saying…? “If you believe that one, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn…”