The Great Bridge

John A. Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge and died in 1869 of an injury taken while surveying the site. His son Washington took over, was crippled by caisson disease in 1872, and directed the rest of the work from a window in Brooklyn Heights, his wife Emily carrying his instructions to the site. The towers were finished by 1876, the cables spun over the next several years, and the bridge opened on 24 May 1883 with a main span of 1,595 feet, the longest in the world.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted The Tower of Babel in 1563; it hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. He set the tower in a Flemish port and gave it the tiers of the Colosseum, then filled every ledge with masons, cranes, hoists and carts, so that the eye can wander the building for an hour. It is a painting about ambition measured against the size of a man.

Bruegel's spiral becomes a granite tower with two pointed arches, wrapped in scaffold and derricks, standing in the East River with the city spread behind it. Footropes swing out from the top to both shores and men walk them. Below, the river is thick with traffic, a paddle steamer packed with passengers in the left foreground, sloops and smoking tugs. In the near corner, where Bruegel put his king inspecting the masons, a stone yard is stacked with cut blocks and horse carts, and men in shirtsleeves are moving them one at a time.

It took thirteen years and at least twenty lives, and on the day it opened some 150,000 people walked across to see what that had bought.