Brooklyn Bridge

Pedestrians walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, the suspension bridge between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights, New York, USA.

The skyscrapers of Manhattan, with the distinctive tapering Chrysler Building top right, and behind it Brooklyn Bridge. The Chrysler Building, built in 1930, is one of New York's tallest buildings, 319 m/1,046 ft in height, with 77 storeys.

Suspension bridge between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn Heights, New York, the first bridge to be built across the East River. Designed and constructed 1869–83 by civil engineer John A Roebling and his son Washington A Roebling, it became a powerful symbol to the world of the confidence and dynamism of New York City and the USA.

Brooklyn Bridge was a major 19th-century engineering feat. It has two massive towers composed largely of granite, and was the first bridge to use steel wire in its cables. Its construction was fraught with mishaps and tragedies; John Roebling died after an accident while surveying the site, and his son contracted the ‘bends’ after working at depth in a pier caisson. On completion, it was the world's longest suspension bridge, with a central span of 487 m/1,596 ft. Its opening brought the independent cities of New York and Brooklyn together, and in 1898 they merged. The bridge originally carried trains and trams, but nowadays is a crossing for cars and pedestrians. It has been immortalized in poetry (notably by Walt Whitman and Hart Crane) and in painting (especially the striking modernist canvases of Joseph Stella).