48 Fun Facts About The Brooklyn Bridge

Which body of water does the Brooklyn Bridge span?

The East River is no river at all but a saltwater tidal strait, linking New York's harbour to Long Island Sound with Manhattan on one bank and Brooklyn on the other.

What was the Brooklyn Bridge billed as in 1883?

Eighth Wonder of the World. The bridge earned the billing with a main span longer than any bridge had managed before, hung from stone towers taller than New York's tallest office building.

Which New York bridge took the Brooklyn Bridge's title as the world's longest suspension bridge when it opened in 1903?

Williamsburg Bridge. Opened upstream in 1903, it took the record with a main span of 1,600 feet, just four and a half feet longer than the Brooklyn Bridge's.

Before the Brooklyn Bridge, John Roebling spanned the Ohio River with a suspension bridge at which city?

Cincinnati. His son Washington helped him finish the bridge across to Covington, Kentucky, in 1867, the year Roebling himself was appointed to plan a far longer span for Brooklyn.

How did Brooklyn Bridge designer John Roebling die in 1869?

Tetanus after a ferry crushed his foot: Roebling sent his doctors away and treated the wound himself by pouring water over it, and he was dead within a month.

Washington Roebling's nephew and namesake, a young sports-car maker, died aboard which ship?

The Titanic. Washington A. Roebling II, 31, had been test-driving cars in Europe and stood back from the lifeboats; his uncle, the bridge's ailing chief engineer, outlived him by 14 years.

What illness left Washington Roebling partly paralysed and unable to visit the Brooklyn Bridge site for most of its construction?

Caisson disease (the bends) comes from returning too fast from high pressure to normal air; in the 1870s there was little understanding of how slowly the men had to be brought back.

Which member of the Roebling family relayed the bedridden chief engineer's orders for over a decade as the Brooklyn Bridge rose?

Emily Warren, his wife, mastered the engineering, carried his orders to the site and talked officials out of replacing him; she then rode the first carriage across, a rooster on her lap as a sign of victory.

What do New York City crews regularly cut off the Brooklyn Bridge, to the dismay of visiting couples?

Love locks. The city put up signs in 2016 threatening a $100 fine, weeks after the wire of a street light on the bridge snapped under the weight of the padlocks couples had clipped to it.

Which New York organisation controlled the company set up to build the Brooklyn Bridge?

Tammany Hall. Its boss, William Tweed, sat on the bridge company's board and held a block of its stock, though his ring was broken more than a decade before the bridge opened.

Fifteen years after the Brooklyn Bridge opened, Brooklyn became what?

A borough. Brooklyn, until then a city in its own right, had voted by a narrow margin to join Greater New York, and the merger took effect on 1 January 1898.

What were the Brooklyn Bridge's caissons filled with once they reached their final depth?

Concrete. Packed solid, the great timber boxes were left in place under the river, and the two towers still rest on them.

What accident in December 1870 forced months of repairs on the unfinished Brooklyn Bridge?

A caisson fire. A workman's candle is thought to have set the timber roof alight, and the fire ate so deep into it that the whole chamber had to be flooded to put it out.

What nickname was given to the labourers who dug the Brooklyn Bridge's foundations deep beneath the riverbed?

Sandhogs. The name stuck to New York's underground diggers, who went on from the bridge's foundations to bore the city's subway and water tunnels.

How did contractor J. Lloyd Haigh cheat the Brooklyn Bridge's builders?

Substituted inferior-quality wire in the cables: tests by Roebling's engineers exposed the swap, and making good the weak wire meant tons of extra cable work.

What did workers digging the Brooklyn Bridge's foundations finally use to break up boulders too big to move?

Explosives. Fearing a blast might burst the pressurised chamber, Washington Roebling first fired a pistol with heavier and heavier charges; blasting then more than doubled the caisson's weekly descent.

Which metal was first used for bridge cables on the Brooklyn Bridge?

Steel. John Roebling called it 'the metal of the future' and planned to use it in place of iron wire; no bridge had hung from steel cables before.

What architectural style are the Brooklyn Bridge's stone towers?

Neo-Gothic. Each tower is pierced by two pointed arches, like cathedral windows, so the roadways can run straight through between the solid shafts that carry the cables.

In July 2014, intruders swapped the American flags atop the Brooklyn Bridge's towers for flags of what colour?

White. They were all-white versions of the American flag, hoisted overnight after the lights trained on the flagpoles had been covered with pans; the police said they would not treat it as a joke or as art.

In which New Jersey city did John Roebling build the factory that made his family's fortune?

Trenton. Roebling had watched the hemp ropes that hauled canal boats over a mountain portage wear out, twisted wire into a tougher replacement, and soon needed a factory to meet the demand.

What were the vaults built into the Brooklyn Bridge's Manhattan approach rented out for from 1876?

Storing wine. The windowless vaults stayed cool all year and the rent helped pay for the bridge; one cellar wall carried the rhyme 'Who loveth not wine, women and song, he remaineth a fool his whole life long.'

Besides its main cables and vertical suspenders, what else holds up the Brooklyn Bridge's deck?

Diagonal stays from the towers share the load with the main cables, which makes the bridge a hybrid of two designs, suspension and cable-stayed, and gives it its spider's-web look.

Under which name did the Brooklyn Bridge open in 1883?

The New York and Brooklyn Bridge was named for the two separate cities it joined, which until then had been linked only by ferry.

Which sitting US president crossed the Brooklyn Bridge at its opening ceremony in 1883?

Chester A. Arthur crossed from the Manhattan side with New York's mayor and governor, and Brooklyn's mayor was waiting at the far end to shake his hand.

What tragedy struck the Brooklyn Bridge days after it opened?

A stampede killed at least twelve people. On a holiday when the walkway was packed with strollers, a woman slipped on a stairway, someone screamed, and the crowd crushed in from both sides.

Which circus owner marched 21 elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge in 1884 to show it was safe?

P. T. Barnum sent 21 elephants across, his giant star Jumbo among them; the parade settled doubts about whether the span could bear a crowd and made splendid publicity for his circus.

Roughly how much did the Brooklyn Bridge cost to build?

$15 million. That was more than twice what John Roebling had estimated when he drew up his plans.

Which museum received Washington Roebling's collection of some 16,000 minerals after his death in 1926?

The Smithsonian. His son gave it the unusually fine collection, and American mineralogy's highest honour is still called the Roebling Medal after the man who built the bridge.

Steve Brodie became famous for supposedly doing what at the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886?

Jumping from the bridge and surviving. Nobody could prove he had really done it, but the claim made him famous, and 'to do a brodie' entered American slang for a suicidal or daredevil leap.

In American slang, what kind of person is said to be ready to 'buy the Brooklyn Bridge'?

A gullible one. Con men such as George C. Parker are said to have 'sold' the bridge to newcomers again and again, though one historian found no evidence that anybody ever really bought it.

Washington Roebling halted the dig for the Brooklyn Bridge's Manhattan tower short of what, fearing more deaths among his workers?

Bedrock. With three of his men dead, Roebling judged the packed subsoil firm enough and stopped the dig, so the Manhattan tower has stood ever since on ground well above the rock.

What replaced the Brooklyn Bridge's trolley tracks around 1950?

Car lanes. The rebuilding widened each roadway from two lanes to three, and a bridge designed around trains and carriages was given over to the automobile.

What pulled the Brooklyn Bridge's first passenger trains across the span when the service began in 1883?

An endless moving cable. A stationary steam engine beneath the Brooklyn end drove a loop of wire rope and the cars were hauled across on it, much as on a hillside cable railway.

What replaced a car lane on the Brooklyn Bridge's Manhattan-bound roadway in September 2021?

A protected two-way bike path. It took cyclists off the crowded walkway they had shared with pedestrians for decades, which then became walkers-only.

Where did John Roebling place the Brooklyn Bridge's walkway, promising it would be 'of incalculable value' to a crowded city?

Above the roadway. Roebling lifted the promenade clear of the traffic purely for the pleasure of people on foot, who get an open view over both sides of the bridge.

Which country's navy training ship struck the Brooklyn Bridge in May 2025, snapping its masts?

Mexico. The tall ship Cuauhtémoc was leaving New York when it ran backwards under the bridge, whose deck hangs well below the tops of the ship's masts; two of its crew were killed.

Which historian wrote the 1972 Brooklyn Bridge history The Great Bridge?

David McCullough. He counted 21 men killed building the bridge, and when his book inspired an Oscar-nominated documentary a decade later, he narrated the film himself.

Which modernist poet made the Brooklyn Bridge the central symbol of his 1930 book-length poem The Bridge?

Hart Crane meant The Bridge, at least in part, as a hopeful American answer to the bleakness of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, with the span as the symbol that binds the nation's story together.

Which time-travel romance brings a man from 1876, with the Brooklyn Bridge half-built, to modern New York?

Kate & Leopold. Hugh Jackman's duke chases a time-travelling stranger onto the unfinished bridge in 1876 and falls with him through a portal into the New York of Meg Ryan.

Which documentary maker's 1981 film Brooklyn Bridge chronicled the bridge's construction?

Ken Burns was an unknown in his twenties when he made Brooklyn Bridge, his first film; its Oscar nomination launched the career that led to The Civil War and Baseball.

Before the Brooklyn Bridge, John Roebling made his name with a suspension bridge across which famous gorge?

The Niagara Gorge. Suspension bridges of the day were known to fail in high winds or under heavy loads, but Roebling's stiffened design held firm beside the falls and made his reputation.

John Roebling, designer of the Brooklyn Bridge, emigrated to America at 25 from which present-day country?

Germany. Born in Mühlhausen, then in Prussia, Roebling studied engineering in Berlin and sailed in 1831 with a band of hometown emigrants who hoped to found a colony of their own.

In which state did John Roebling first settle, farming in a colony he helped found?

Pennsylvania. The colony near Pittsburgh drew few settlers and Roebling made a poor farmer, so within a few years the future bridge builder was back at engineering, as a surveyor for the state.

Where did Washington Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge's chief engineer, study engineering in the 1850s?

Rensselaer Polytechnic in Troy. He graduated in 1857 and went straight to work on his father's bridges; once the Brooklyn Bridge was finished he moved back to Troy while his own son studied there.

At which Civil War battle did Washington Roebling help haul the first cannon up a rocky hill on the Union flank?

Gettysburg. The hill was Little Round Top, and earlier in the campaign Roebling, scouting from a balloon, is credited with being the first to see Lee's army on the move north.

How did al-Qaeda's Iyman Faris plan to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge?

Cutting the support wires with blowtorches was the idea, but after scouting the bridge Faris judged it too well guarded and sent his handlers a coded message: 'the weather is too hot.'

In which film does the military destroy the Brooklyn Bridge to quarantine a plague-stricken Manhattan?

I Am Legend. Three years on, Will Smith's military scientist is the only healthy human left on the island, immune to the virus and still hunting for a cure in his basement lab.

The Brooklyn Banks, under the Brooklyn Bridge's Manhattan approach, became a world-famous spot for which pastime?

Skateboarding. Skaters adopted the slopes in the 1980s, petitioned for years to save them, and saw the Banks reopen in 2025 after 15 years fenced off as a works yard for bridge repairs.