"Building the Brooklyn Bridge is a perfect feast, a would-be
time-traveler's delight, overflowing with rare and evocative and
fascinating images." -Kurt Andersen Recipient of the 2021 Book Award
from The Victorian Society New York. The captivating story of how a
bridge of unprecedented size and technology was built during an age of
remarkable innovation. This book invites the reader to step back in time
to discover why this iconic bridge--proclaimed the 'eighth wonder of the
world' soon after its completion and a National Historic Landmark since
1964--continues to hold such a special place in the hearts of so many.
Spanning the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge connected for the first
time the then independent cities of Brooklyn and New York. This
awe-inspiring structure was not only a modern engineering feat of
extraordinary imagination, fortitude, and skill, it also was a towering
beacon of human triumph. Author Jeffrey Richman, historian at Brooklyn's
famed Green-Wood Cemetery, has gathered more than 250 superb
nineteenth-century images, many never before published on the printed
page, including engineering drawings, photographs, stereographs,
woodcuts, and colored lithographs. Flipping through the book, one can
imagine the excitement people around the world felt as they followed the
progress of the bridge's construction, either through the illustrated
papers of the day or using viewers to look at stereographs in three
dimensions. Richman specially commissioned more than forty anaglyphs--3D
images generated from the historic stereographs--to recreate the 3D
experience on the page. Every copy of the book includes a pair of 3D
glasses kept in a pocket inside the back cover, offering the reader the
sensation of being at the construction site as the towers began to rise.
A born storyteller, Richman relates how a small group of dedicated
engineers and thousands of workers toiled for more than a decade to
construct what was then the largest suspension bridge ever built,
section by section, from the massive anchorages and elegant towers to
the cables and bridge railway (operational four months after the
bridge's official opening). He reminds us how profoundly modern and
groundbreaking the bridge was, in its use of steel (a new material) and
pioneering construction methods. The bridge still elicits awe and
admiration today."This is one of humankind's great creations"-author
interview with Michelle Miller on CBS Saturday Morning. Click here to
watch 7-minute segment on book and bridge.
