Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [745]
Young Roebling’s first task was to design and oversee the construction of just such caissons—essentially huge, watertight, submersible boxes that could shelter work crews while they dug down in search of bedrock on which to erect the giant towers. In May 1870 the first caisson was floated four miles down the East River from the Webb and Bell yards to just beside the Fulton ferry slip. Now, invisible to onshore watchers, the mostly Irish, German, and Italian laborers set to work under limelights—calcium lamps normally used for stage lighting or nighttime political rallies—boring their way down through traprock and basalt, at fewer than six inches a week. To speed the process, workers using long steel drills hammered holes in the obdurate rock, tamped them full of blasting powder, and set them off. Working around the clock (three eight-hour shifts every day except Sunday), the rate of descent accelerated to twelve to eighteen inches a week, and the bottom was soon reached.
In May 1871, while the Brooklyn tower rose ponderously out of the water, the process began again on the deeper, more difficult New York side. Now to the grueling work and foul odors were added incidents of a strange and painful disease. Laborers found blood spurting from their noses and mouths and fell prey to terrible cramps, which so contorted their bodies that the ailment was named “the bends.” As the shaft sank deeper, workers began to die (young Al Smith, who lived near the construction site, listened to neighborhood talk of their horrible deaths). The company hired a doctor to investigate and while he never quite identified the cause—nitrogen bubbles trapped in the blood—he more or less stumbled on the solution, a slower transition from compressed to normal atmosphere. He urged a five-to-six-minute exit procedure (twenty minutes would have worked), but with the company in a hurry to finish and workers in a hurry to get out, they settled on a two-to-three-minute transit—so men kept dying.
Building the Brooklyn Bridge, 1877 engraving. (© Collection of The New-York Historical Society)
On May 8, galvanized by the terrifying conditions, the caisson men struck for an increase in pay: three dollars for their four-hour stints. The Bridge Company agreed to $2.75, which the men angrily turned down, but when Kingsley announced he would fire them all, the strike collapsed. Roebling, aware laborers were at their limits, gave orders on May 18 to halt further digging, chancing that the level already reached, though not bedrock, would provide a sturdy enough base. Now the final stages commenced—though without Roebling. His health crushed by the ordeal, he spent the next several years in European spas and in Trenton, New Jersey, trying in vain to recover, but all the while directing the ongoing work via letters to his on-site assistants.
In June 1875 the Brooklyn tower was finished. Little over a year later the last stone was set in place on its New York counterpart. As crowds watched on both shores—it was the “best attended circus in the world,” said the Tribune—the first cables were strung over the tops of the immense towers, taller even than the spire of Trinity Church. Finally, on Friday, August 25, Master Mechanic E. F. Farrington, an agile sixty-year-old, donned a linen suit and a new straw hat and climbed into a little seat attached by pulley to the wire rope. Then, as tens of thousands cheered, cannons roared, church bells clanged, and tugs shrilled their whistles, Farrington was hauled aloft to the flag-bedecked top of the Brooklyn tower, sailed serenely across the river (lifting his hat from time to time), and then brought safely down, twenty-two minutes after his departure, on the tumultuous Manhattan shore. The bridge’s span would take years more to complete, and the 1876 mini-Festival of Connection would be dwarfed by the official one in 1883, but it was as plain as