The Brooklyn Bridge Trivia
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48 free The Brooklyn Bridge trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Brooklyn Bridge trivia begins with the family that built it: John Roebling, the Prussian-born engineer killed by tetanus before a stone was laid; his son Washington, crippled by caisson disease; and Emily Warren Roebling, who carried the work for a decade and crossed first with a rooster in her lap. The quiz covers the caissons and the 'Great Blowout', the bends, the 27 dead, Tammany Hall, and J. Lloyd Haigh's fraudulent wire that still hangs in the design margins. Then the structure and the spectacle: the neo-Gothic towers taller than anything but Trinity Church, Rosendale cement, four cables of 5,282 wires, the wine vaults under the anchorage, the 1,595-foot span, opening day with President Arthur, the fatal stampede a week later, and Jumbo leading 21 elephants across for Barnum. Later questions cover jumpers from Odlum to Brodie, 'selling' the bridge, tolls abolished in 1911, cable cars, elevated trains and trolleys until 1950, the Bethlehem Steel recabling, the 1983 centennial, Hart Crane, Ken Burns, the al-Qaeda blowtorch plot, the Brooklyn Banks skate park and the 2021 bike lane. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the Brooklyn Bridge and the three Roeblings, with the supporting sentence attached to each question. Easy questions suit anyone who has walked the promenade; the expert tier reaches Janes & Kirtland and Inc. magazine.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which body of water does the Brooklyn Bridge span?
The East River
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.
Q 02What was the Brooklyn Bridge billed as in 1883?
Eighth Wonder of the World
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.
Q 03Which New York bridge took the Brooklyn Bridge's title as the world's longest suspension bridge when it opened in 1903?
Williamsburg Bridge
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.
Q 04Before the Brooklyn Bridge, John Roebling spanned the Ohio River with a suspension bridge at which city?
Cincinnati
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.
Q 05How did Brooklyn Bridge designer John Roebling die in 1869?
Tetanus after a ferry crushed his foot
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.
Q 06Washington Roebling's nephew and namesake, a young sports-car maker, died aboard which ship?
The Titanic
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.
Q 07What illness left Washington Roebling partly paralysed and unable to visit the Brooklyn Bridge site for most of its construction?
Caisson disease (the bends)
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.
Q 08Which 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
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.
Q 09What do New York City crews regularly cut off the Brooklyn Bridge, to the dismay of visiting couples?
Love locks
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.
Q 10Which New York organisation controlled the company set up to build the Brooklyn Bridge?
Tammany Hall
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.
Q 11Fifteen years after the Brooklyn Bridge opened, Brooklyn became what?
A borough
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.
Q 12What were the Brooklyn Bridge's caissons filled with once they reached their final depth?
Concrete
Concrete. Packed solid, the great timber boxes were left in place under the river, and the two towers still rest on them.
Q 13What accident in December 1870 forced months of repairs on the unfinished Brooklyn Bridge?
A caisson fire
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.
Q 21What were the vaults built into the Brooklyn Bridge's Manhattan approach rented out for from 1876?
Storing wine
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.'
Q 22Besides its main cables and vertical suspenders, what else holds up the Brooklyn Bridge's deck?
Diagonal stays
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.
Q 23Under which name did the Brooklyn Bridge open in 1883?
Q 14What nickname was given to the labourers who dug the Brooklyn Bridge's foundations deep beneath the riverbed?
Sandhogs
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.
Q 15How did contractor J. Lloyd Haigh cheat the Brooklyn Bridge's builders?
Substituted inferior-quality wire in the cables
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.
Q 16What did workers digging the Brooklyn Bridge's foundations finally use to break up boulders too big to move?
Explosives
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.
Q 17Which metal was first used for bridge cables on the Brooklyn Bridge?
Steel
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.
Q 18What architectural style are the Brooklyn Bridge's stone towers?
Neo-Gothic
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.
Q 19In July 2014, intruders swapped the American flags atop the Brooklyn Bridge's towers for flags of what colour?
White
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.
Q 20In which New Jersey city did John Roebling build the factory that made his family's fortune?
Trenton
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.
The New York and Brooklyn Bridge
The New York and Brooklyn Bridge was named for the two separate cities it joined, which until then had been linked only by ferry.
Q 24Which sitting US president crossed the Brooklyn Bridge at its opening ceremony in 1883?
Chester A. Arthur
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.
Q 25What tragedy struck the Brooklyn Bridge days after it opened?
A stampede killed at least twelve people
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.
Q 26Which circus owner marched 21 elephants across the Brooklyn Bridge in 1884 to show it was safe?
P. T. Barnum
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.
Q 27Roughly how much did the Brooklyn Bridge cost to build?
$15 million
$15 million. That was more than twice what John Roebling had estimated when he drew up his plans.
Q 28Which museum received Washington Roebling's collection of some 16,000 minerals after his death in 1926?
The Smithsonian
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.
Q 29Steve Brodie became famous for supposedly doing what at the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886?
Jumping from the bridge and surviving
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.
Q 30In American slang, what kind of person is said to be ready to 'buy the Brooklyn Bridge'?
A gullible one
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.