Brooklyn Bridge History: How It United Two Worlds (Thanks to Emily Warren Roebling)

When the Brooklyn Bridge was completed after fourteen years of works, Emily Warren Roebling was the first to cross it, carrying a live cockerel in her lap as a sign of victory. Even today, that gesture is remembered as the feat of a woman serving an idea greater than her time.

The plaque that the city dedicated to her in 1951 on the shoulder of the legendary New York bridge sums up the spirit of the Brooklyn Bridge construction, which marked the beginning of modern American civil engineering: «Behind every great work we can find the devoted altruism of a woman».

In the mid-nineteenth century New York was a divided city, like two distant worlds. The East River separated Manhattan from Brooklyn, then an independent centre, connected only by ferries often halted by ice or fog.

On one of those crossings, in 1852, the engineer John Augustus Roebling, a visionary builder of steel suspension bridges, conceived a revolutionary project: a suspension bridge more than a kilometre long, able to withstand currents, winds, and unprecedented traffic. The idea was rejected by experts and authorities, mocked and boycotted on both banks as “impossible to build!”.

Roebling did not give up. Fifteen years later he managed to find funding and get the project approved, but in July 1869 the Brooklyn Bridge’s designer died of tetanus after an accident at the dock, before the works began. His son Washington, an engineer just thirty years old, took over and supervised the first phase of the works.

The planned span of the New York bridge was the longest at the time, the foundations had to sink into the marsh below water level, and the technology of steel cables was still young. During the digging and the placing of the gigantic pneumatic caissons (12 metres below the level of the river on the Brooklyn side and over 20 on the Manhattan side) dozens of workers fell ill with decompression sickness and Washington himself was left semi‑paralysed.

That was when his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, entered the scene. Graduated in history and passionate about mathematics, she learned the basics of civil engineering as a self‑taught student, studied calculations and materials, and managed contracts and workers. While Washington was confined to bed and followed the progress of the Brooklyn Bridge construction with a telescope, she supervised the works and coordinated technicians, workers, oversight authorities, and the media.

On 24 May 1883, after 14 years of works and a cost of 15 million dollars, the New York bridge was finally inaugurated.

The structure, with limestone towers 85 metres high and steel cables intertwined like the strings of a harp, made it the longest suspension bridge in the world at the time, but New Yorkers were distrustful. The vastness of the span and the technological audacity inspired fear, so few dared to cross it. Years earlier, chief mechanic Frank Farrington had completed the crossing hanging from a rope to demonstrate its strength, but even that was not enough.

A spectacular gesture was therefore necessary. On 17 May 1884 Phineas Taylor Barnum, founder of the famous circus, paraded twenty‑one elephants led by the majestic Jumbo, together with camels and dromedaries. That procession over the East River put an end to the doubts and transformed the Brooklyn Bridge into a monument to faith in human ingenuity, giving life to more than a century of economic development.

With the famous suspension bridge, Manhattan and Brooklyn became a single metropolis and the ease of crossing encouraged urban expansion, rising wages, and the birth of an integrated economic system that laid the foundations for “Greater New York” in 1898.

More than 140 years have passed since the inauguration of the Brooklyn Bridge, yet it is still today one the most iconic New York bridges and a vital infrastructure for the city: over 116,000 vehicles, 30,000 pedestrians, and three thousand cyclists cross it every day (more than 40 million people per year).

Many of these are tourists: the Brooklyn Bridge is in fact among the most visited places in the city, a symbol of resilience and progress.

The area surrounding it has flourished. On the Brooklyn side, in the DUMBO district (not from the passage of elephants on the bridge, but from the acronym Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) the average value of a home exceeds 1.6 million dollars. The Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce recorded in 2024 over 11,000 jobs in the creative and technological sectors, with 51,000 new businesses.

The famous suspension bridge continues to be maintained like a precious machine. The city of New York invests tens of millions of dollars every year in maintenance, painting, and structural consolidation, constant attention that guarantees the safety and long life of an infrastructure that has now entered the urban DNA.

The Brooklyn Bridge is not only an engineering marvel, it’s a symbol of how a great work of infrastructure can reshape the economic and social history of a territory, unite communities, drive development, and inspire trust.

Stories like this are featured on Evolutio (www.evolutio.museum), the first digital museum of infrastructure. It retraces the history of major works built by the Webuild Group over more than 120 years, through a unique multimedia archive, partly unpublished, containing 1.5 million photos and videos made available by Webuild.

Within the digital museum, which explores the evolution, impact, and meaning of infrastructure, a dedicated section highlights those projects that initially sparked debate and opposition during their design phase, only to prove, from the moment they were inaugurated, their strategic value and transformative impact on local economies.

Just as the Brooklyn Bridge did for New York, Italy’s Autostrada del Sole was once criticized as unnecessary and unfeasible. Yet, like the bridge, it became a vital artery for an entire nation, connecting the South to the North and driving Italy’s economic and social growth.