The Bridge That Took Its Toll

The bridge rises out of lower Manhattan on two stone towers, its cables strung in long fans, and its wooden pedestrian path runs above the traffic lanes rather than beside them, so that Polly could look straight down through the wires at boats moving underneath. Finished in eighteen eighty-three, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time, and the first to cross the East River.

Building the towers meant working underwater. Engineers sank huge wooden boxes called caissons to the riverbed, sealed and pumped full of pressed air to keep the water out, and men dug inside them by lantern light. Moving from that heavy air back to normal air too quickly let gas bubble inside the body, and by the time the towers were finished, well over a hundred workers had been struck by the illness doctors first named after this very bridge.

One of those workers was the bridge's own chief engineer, left partly paralyzed and confined to a nearby apartment for the rest of the project. From his window he watched the towers rise through a telescope and sent instructions down through his wife, who taught herself engineering well enough to run the site in his place and became, in practice, the person who understood the bridge best of all.

A year after it opened, a rumor that the bridge might collapse caused a stampede that killed a dozen people, so a showman marched twenty-one elephants across it in a single line to prove the structure could bear far more than any crowd. Polly landed on a cable above the spot and watched the last of the elephants clear the far tower, unhurried, in no doubt at all.