Building the Brooklyn Bridge: 1869-1883

This is the captivating story of how the Brooklyn Bridge—a structure of unprecedented size and technology—was built during an age of remarkable innovation.

Spanning the East River, the bridge connected for the first time the then independent cities of Brooklyn and New York. People could now travel high above one of the busiest waterways in the world, journeying across by foot, horse-drawn carriage, or railway as they took in the magnificent views. This awe-inspiring structure was not only a modern engineering feat of extraordinary imagination, fortitude, and skill, it also was a towering beacon of human triumph.

Author Jeffrey Richman has gathered 253 superb 19th-century images, many never before published on the printed page, including engineering drawings, photographs, stereographs (seen in 3D using a viewer), woodcuts, and colored lithographs. He also specially created several anaglyphs—3D images generated from stereographs—offering the reader the sensation of being at the construction site as the towers begin to rise. A born storyteller, Richman relates how a small group of dedicated engineers and thousands of workers toiled for more than a decade to construct what was then the largest suspension bridge ever built, section by section, from the massive anchorages and elegant towers to the cables and bridge railway (operational four months after the bridge’s official opening). He reminds us how profoundly modern and groundbreaking the bridge was, in its use of steel (a new material) and pioneering construction methods. This book invites the reader to step back in time to discover why this iconic bridge—proclaimed the ‘eighth wonder of the world’ soon after its completion and a National Historic Landmark in 1964—continues to hold such a special place in the hearts of so many.

A pair of 3D glasses are included with every copy of the book.