Walkabout: The Williamsburg Bridge

No one disputes that the Brooklyn Bridge is one of the architectural and engineering masterpieces of this city. It’s beloved, iconic, and a technological marvel. It’s also quite beautiful, and no visit to this city is really complete if you don’t walk across it, preferably to visit over there on the other side, and then come back to Brooklyn.

We love the Brooklyn Bridge, and rightfully so. But what about those other bridges? Well, not so much. Take the Williamsburg Bridge, for example, probably the least loved of them all. Scientific American wrote in 1903 that considered from the aesthetic standpoint, the Williamsburg Bridge is destined always to suffer by comparison with its neighbor, the Brooklyn Bridge…As a matter of fact, the Williamsburg Bridge is an engineer’s bridge, pure and simple.

John DeWitt Warner, who served as a Congressman from NY, at the time of its construction, described the bridge as a surrender of the City Beautiful to the City Vulgar. So what is it about the Williamsburg Bridge?

John Roebling, the designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, always thought there was a need for more than one span across the East River. In the 1880’s, proponents of a bridge from the Lower East Side to Williamsburg were fighting opponents in Manhattan who did not want the bridge, and the powerful ferry companies who really didn’t want it.

Legislative approval was gained in Albany, but no appropriations were ever forthcoming. In 1895, the New East River Bridge Commission was formed, and plans finally went ahead for a bridge. Henry Hornbostel was the architect of the bridge and Leffert L. Buck was chosen as the chief engineer. Plans for the bridge were published in an 1896 issue of Engineering News.

The proposed bridge was to cost $17 million, which was much less than the more expensive $15 million Brooklyn Bridge. Money was to be saved by by a much different construction.

Less expensive steel towers meant that foundations could be smaller and the towers taller, and steel was much less expensive than masonry arches. The 310 foot towers were the first all-steel towers to be employed for a suspension bridge.

The towers support the four main cables, which are carried on saddles on top of the towers. Unusual for a standard suspension bridge, the side spans are cantilevered, drawing no support from the cables above. Nearly 17,500 miles of wire were used in the cables that suspend the bridge 135 feet over the East River. All of this cable was made by the Roebling Company.

In 1902, bridge designer Gustav Lindenthal took over as chief engineer of the Williamsburg Bridge. He didn’t like the appearance of the bridge either, but the project was too far along to do much about it.

It’s said that after it was built, Lindenthal would never talk about how it looked, but would always emphasize that it was twice as strong as the Brooklyn Bridge. On December 19, 1903, the Williamsburg Bridge opened to horse drawn carriages, bicycles and pedestrians.

The elevated trains didn’t run across the span until 1908, mostly because of complications between private and city railroads. In the end, the bridge cost $24.2 million, more than three times the original estimate. The over runs on public works projects is not a new thing in this city.

The Williamsburg Bridge held the title of World’s Longest Suspension Bridge for 17 years, a title it stole from the Brooklyn Bridge, and surrendered to the Bear Mountain Bridge in 1924.

But there have always been problems with it. After 10 years of use, engineers noticed the bridge was sagging, due to the heavy traffic on the bridge.

At that time, it was running heavier subway cars that what were available when it was built, as well as heavier trolleys, not to mention automobiles and trucks, which the designers never saw coming in the numbers that followed.

In 1911, two additional supports were added under each of the unsuspended side spans, and additional steel was added to the deck so it could carry heavier subway cars. In the 1920’s the LIRR stopped running across the bridge, and the span was reconfigured to allow for eight lanes of vehicular traffic.

By 1964, people were talking about replacing the bridge, as no repair or upkeep had ever been done, and rust was raining down on traffic and people. During the 1970’s the pedestrian walkway was shut down when a worker got mugged.

By the 1980’s, it had gotten critical, as there was so much corrosion in the cables, beams and steel supports that the bridge had to be shut down for 2 months for emergency construction. At this time, ideas for replacing the bridge were bounced around, but in the end, the DOT ended up with a 15 year, $1 billion dollar reconstruction which began in 1988 and ended in 2006.

The Williamsburg Bridge is important to the development of Brooklyn. It was a direct link from the overcrowded streets of the Lower East Side to Brooklyn, and spurred the growth of Brooklyn’s ethnic working class neighborhoods of Williamsburg, Bushwick, Greenpoint and beyond.

Immigrants from Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Italy doubled the population of Williamsburg in the space of ten years. The bridge influenced the growth of Williamsburg from the mixed Jewish, non-Jewish German and Irish neighborhood it had been in the late 19th century, into the heavily Jewish neighborhood it had become by 1920, as thousands moved from the Lower East Side to a better life in Brooklyn.

Unfortunately, too many people moved to Williamsburg at the same time, creating horrific conditions in the many tenement buildings in the area. By 1917, Williamsburg had the most densely populated streets in the city.

The Hasidic Jewish population followed, starting in the 1930’s, fleeing the Nazis in Poland, Germany and the rest of Europe. They were joined by Puerto Rican, Dominican, and other Hispanic immigrants in the 1960’s.

The BQE was run through the neighborhood by Robert Moses, and then housing projects replaced many of the tenements. The last group to arrive in Williamsburg were the artists, reclaiming the empty factories, followed by the more monied classes, spurring the huge developments of condos and luxury housing, creating the three part Williamsburg we have today.

Throughout all of the development, the Williamsburg Bridge has remained as a useful alternative to the Brooklyn or Manhattan Bridges, a direct route to the BQE, but rarely a destination unless you are going to Williamsburg itself.

Its entrances and exits are confusing if you don’t know where you are going, especially on and off the BQE, and the layout of Williamsburg itself often gets people lost once they get off the bridge.

Personally, driving on the outside lanes, swung out over the cantilevered sides gives me the willies. No one seems to like it. However, it’s an architectural marvel, listed as a National Historic Civil Engineering Landmark by the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2009.

I recently ran across some incredibly high definition photographs of the bridge on a site called Shorpy’s. Take a look at these two photos, one and two. Be sure to see them in full screen, hi-def. The details are incredible.

After seeing them, I must say, I have a new respect for the bridge as art, a beautiful thing of steel and human engineering, maybe not aesthetically beautiful, but certainly a marvel, nonetheless.

Research from Bridgepros.com, Wikipedia, Brooklyn Eagle, and the Brooklyn Public Library.