Look at that entrance. You're standing at the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge. On the other side of this thing is Brooklyn. A mile of cable, steel, and granite separating two cities that, in eighteen eighty-three, were still separate cities. Brooklyn wasn't part of New York yet. It was the third-largest city in America. Independent. Proud. And absolutely sick of the ferry.
Because in January of eighteen sixty-seven, the East River froze solid. Five thousand New Yorkers walked across the ice to get to work. Just — trudged across a frozen river in the dark because the ferries couldn't run. The city made over a thousand crossings a day on that river, and when winter shut it down, everything stopped. Commerce. Commuters. Mail. Everything.
That's when a German-born engineer named John Augustus Roebling looked at the frozen river and said — we're building a bridge.
Roebling was not a normal engineer. He studied under Hegel in Berlin — the philosopher. Went to lectures. Took notes. W
hen he wasn't designing bridges, he was writing a one-thousand-page unpublished treatise on the nature of the universe. A thousand pages. It's at Rutgers now. Nobody's read it.
He also founded a utopian farming colony in Pennsylvania called Saxonburg. It was — and I want to be precise here — a spectacular failure. The soil was terrible. After six miserable years he gave up on paradise and went ba
