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….Appearing
at every level of culture, The Brooklyn Bridge is a national obsession.
For specialized historians and the general public alike, the bridge
is the nineteenth century’s most important and defining work of
engineering. The Library of Congress’ archives hold more images
of the Brooklyn Bridge than of any other manmade structure, and more
images of the bridge than of anything other than Niagara Falls.
The bridge’s international fame has been sustained by the arts.
In film, the bridge is as familiar as the Eiffel Tower or Big Ben. The
bridge has found its celebrants. In the visual and literary arts, the
bridge has made innumerable appearances. Visual representations of the
span have been the subject of exhibitions all over the U.S., and the
original design drawings have been shown at the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York, and the Smithsonian Institution. At the library of
the Brooklyn Historical Society, “Brooklyn Bridge poetry”
has merited a file of its own. No other structure has a similar dossier.
Arthur Miller captured the essence of this cultural prominence in The
New York Times Magazine, March 27th, 1983 when he said: “I doubt
that anything manmade has entered the American imagination in quite
as forceful and prominent a way.”
Miller’s
quote is revealing. Despite its sheer physicality, the cultural history
of the Brooklyn Bridge owes as much to the imagination— the record
as much a process of creation and invention— as it does to historical
events. A broad range of advertising executives, artists, filmmakers,
historians, intellectuals, musicians, politicians, writers, and other
participants in the to-and-fro of cultural commentary have helped develop
the bridge’s image, which has subsequently taken its place among
other canonized American icons: the Statue of Liberty, Niagara Falls,
the Empire State Building, and The Grand Canyon to name a few. As an
American monument, somehow symbolic of the national mind, the bridge
has been discussed and debated, characterized and represented, from
its inception until the present. With each new voice, the bridge’s
image has grown, its cultural lexicon incorporating new concerns and
new interpretations. The history of the Brooklyn Bridge has shown a
capacity for cultural and symbolic metamorphosis.
As the bridge’s physical construction was begun in 1869, a parallel
process of cultural construction was also begun. This has resulted in
two quite distinct Brooklyn Bridges: the physical bridge that stands
astride the East River, linking Brooklyn with Manhattan, and the cultural
bridge of the mind and the imagination. The first is arguably the world’s
most impressive and inspiring public structure, a dazzling monument
to the public good, the common path and the necessity of municipal fellowship;
the second is a vast tapestry of representations, all subject to the
vagaries of individual perception. Needless to say, fundamental tensions
exist between these two Brooklyn Bridges, but also between the various,
competing assessments that constitute the second, cultural bridge.
By
tracing dominant modes of perception and representation, we note some
jarring trends and patterns that constitute the cultural history of
the Brooklyn Bridge. Since The Bridge has been adopted, and interpreted
as a dominant American icon; it is a history not of the bridge per se,
but of the representation of the Brooklyn Bridge from its opening ceremonies
in 1883 to the blackout of 2003. In trying to understand the relationship
between the Brooklyn Bridge and the its representational history, we
might usefully begin with Walt Whitman, the public figure most closely
associated with the cities of New York and Brooklyn during the period
in which the Brooklyn Bridge was conceived. Whitman and the Brooklyn
Bridge have long been conjoined in the public and private imagination….
If we pause to consider Whitman’s relationship with Brooklyn itself,
the poet and the bridge would seem natural companions. “If there
ever existed a city whose resources were undeveloped, whose capabilities
were misunderstood, and undervalued,” wrote Walt Whitman (in The
Future of Brooklyn, The Brooklyn Daily Times, July 14, 1858, “it
is Brooklyn. And less than five years later, certain achievement had
taken the place of “undervalued” potential. Taking aim at
a period “twenty-five or thirty years ahead,” Whitman extolled
in The Brooklyn Standard, April 5, 1862: “The child is already
born, and is now living, stout and hearty, who will see Brooklyn numbering
one million inhabitants! Its situation for grandeur, beauty and salubrity
is unsurpassed probably on the whole surface of the globe; and its destiny
is to be among the most famed and choice of the half dozen of the leading
cities of the world. And all this, doubtless, before the close of the
present century.” The poet’s predictions were on target.
While perhaps not ranking among “the half dozen of the leading
cities of the world,”
Brooklyn’s
growth in the late nineteenth century was remarkable. The city would
grow out of Brooklyn Heights to include Williamsburg to the north, Coney
Island and Gravesend to the south, and Canarsie and New Lots to the
east. Its population, a mere 20,000 in Whitman’s youth, would
become the third-largest in the union, and it would top one million
by the time New York City was consolidated in 1898, a five-fold increase
from 1862, when Whitman was making his predictions. Fuelled by sixty-five
miles of natural shoreline, trade flourished in the city, and by 1880
Brooklyn was the forth-largest industrial city in the U.S. Various history
books on the development of Brooklyn explain that to this was added
significant municipal and cultural improvement. Brooklyn was home to
the U.S.’s first modern sewerage system (1858), urban redevelopment
and civic pride were welded in the designs for Prospect Park (1867)
and Eastern Parkway (1868), and transportation was improved through
the construction of an elevated railroad (1885) and an electric trolley
system (1890). By the century’s end, Brooklyn was home to a Philharmonic
Society (1857), an Academy of Music (1859), a Historical Society (1863),
a free library (1896, at the Pratt Institute), and an Institute of Arts
and Sciences (1897, now the Brooklyn Museum).
Despite these significant advances, Brooklyn remained in the shadows
of its illustrious neighbor over the East River for much of Whitman’s
life. Where New York had its Central Park and Trinity Church, the archetypal
bustling Broadway, and the aristocratic Fifth Avenue, Brooklyn was known
by the more sedate epithet, “the city of homes and churches.”
The municipality’s most famous icon was neither a place nor a
thing, but a preacher. Few traveled to Brooklyn to see Brooklyn itself,
but to hear the words of Henry Ward Beecher, America’s preeminent
religious orator. All this though was destined to change.
On
May 24, 1883, the Great East River Bridge— The Brooklyn Bridge—
was dedicated and declared opened to the public. The opening of the
bridge confirmed and announced what Whitman had long predicted. With
an authentic world icon— the largest suspension bridge in existence
and one of the most talked about engineering feats in an era obsessed
with new technology— Brooklyn had finally come of age. In its
own right, it was now an eminent and distinguished city, a legitimate
destination for global and national travelers. Similarly, it should
have been the crowning moment in Whitman’s career as a Brooklyn
booster. Unfortunately it was not. And the answer to Whitman’s
complex relationship with the Brooklyn Bridge lies more in the realities
of New York history and the poet’s own writings than in the imagination
that presumes Whitman’s love for all things Brooklyn.
In 1944, the city decided to remove the railroad tracks that ran across
the bridge and to raze the transport terminals that stood at either
end. The following year the bridge was reopened to pedestrians and automobile
traffic at a grand ceremony. As Stanley Edgar Hyman subsequently reported
in“This Alluring Roadway,” The New Yorker, May 17, 1952,
“the sponsors of the bridge’s ‘reunveiling’
in 1945 were so certain Whitman must have written something about [the]
Brooklyn Bridge that they recklessly announced that a poem by him would
be read at the ceremony. They were unable to produce.” The sponsors,
however, upheld their promise. Sandwiched between the addresses of Manhattan
Borough President Edgar Nathan Jr., and New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia
was a public reading of Whitman’s “historic verse,”
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” (See Brooklyn Bridge Re-Unveiling
Celebration, Sunday, December 2, 1945 Pictorial Souvenir Program, Roebling
Collection, Rutgers University.)
Written thirteen years before the bridge construction began— a
full twenty-seven years before it opened— “Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry” makes no reference to a bridge between New York and Brooklyn,
and neither does it envision one. Nevertheless, public recitals of his
“historic verse” have become a standard commemorative practice.
The poem again enjoyed public readings at the bridge’s rededication
in 1954, at the span’s seventy-fifth anniversary, and again at
the centennial in 1983. In addition, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”
was the only poem included in Daniela Gioseffi’s much-publicized
Brooklyn Bridge Poetry Walk of June 25, 1972 that made no reference
to the bridge. The same can be said for the New York-based Poets’
House’s Annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge, which has
featured “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” since its inauguration
in 1995 [in imitation of Gioseffi’s initial walk, the first widely
publicized one of 1972.]
As the organizers of the 1945 re-unveiling celebrations realized, Whitman
wrote no poetry that celebrated the Brooklyn Bridge. In fact, he barely
wrote about the bridge at all. The span appears only twice in Whitman’s
voluminous literary output, and on both occasions the reference is fleeting.
In “Song of the Exposition” (1876), the bridge is included
with the Atlantic Cable, the Pacific Railroad, the Suez Canal, the Mont
Cenis, the Gothard, and Hoosac tunnels as an example of the “latest
connections, works, the inter-transportation of the world.” In
the short prose piece, “Manhattan from the Bay” (1878),
Whitman briefly diverts his attention from “the broad water-spread”
of life on the bay— “magnificent in size and power, fill’d
with their incalculable value of human life”— to describe
“the grand obelisk-like towers of the bridge, one on either side,
in haze, yet plainly defin’d, giant brothers twain, throwing free
graceful interlinking loops high across the tumbled current below.”
This reference, written a full five years before the bridge was completed,
represents the last time Whitman referred to the bridge in his writing.
(“Song of the Exposition” was revised from an earlier poem,
“After All, Not to Create Only” (1871), which was read by
Whitman at the Fortieth National Industrial Exposition in New York on
September 7 1871. Originally, no mention was made of the Brooklyn Bridge;
the reference to the structure was added during rewriting and first
published in 1876. (For “Song of the Exposition” see Walt
Whitman: Poetry and Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America,
1996), 341-350. For “Manhattan from the Bay” see Specimen
Days, 116-117.)
From then on, the span’s troubled construction elicited no response
from the Whitman. He made no mention of the opening ceremonies—
a truly national event— even though he was in good health and
loved the raw spectacle of great public occasions.19 In addition, Whitman
was remarkably silent about the early years of the bridge’s construction.
From 1869, when the bridge project was begun, to 1873, Whitman undertook
five long trips to Brooklyn— ranging from five weeks to almost
three months--yet he failed to mention the bridge even once. This is
particularly puzzling since, by his own admission, Whitman regularly
traversed the East River from Brooklyn to New York. As he wrote on June
29, 1871, “I am daily on the water here.” It is possible
that Whitman might have been preoccupied around this time. The eve of
the bridge’s opening marked the ten-year anniversary of the death
of the poet’s mother, an event that caused him immeasurable sadness.
As he wrote shortly after her death: “I feel that the blank in
life and heart left by the death of my mother is what will never to
me be filled.” (We find this in a letter of The Correspondence,
edited by Edwin Haviland Miller, New York University Press, 1964.)
Equally, his move to Camden in 1873 hardly accounts for his continued
silence on the subject of the bridge. As “Manhattan from the Bay”
suggests and his letters confirm, he subsequently visited New York on
many occasions, continued to write of it and corresponded with numerous
friends in the area. From the completion of the bridge in 1883 until
the poet’s death in 1892, there is no evidence that Whitman ever
set foot upon the structure.
Despite the historical record, why has Whitman become so closely linked
with the Brooklyn Bridge? There are numerous answers to this question,
the most persuasive of which concerns the idealized nature of public
memory as it relates to cultural history. Throughout the twentieth century,
those who have voiced Whitman’s unadulterated approval and concomitant
love of the bridge have relied heavily on flawed precedent, assumption,
misreading and specious evidence. Quotes used to support Whitman’s
affection for the bridge have been taken from poems and prose pieces
that had nothing to do with the bridge. On other occasions history has
simply been invented. Although Whitman’s expressed interest in
the bridge is at best marginal, his place in the bridge’s cultural
history has become central…. As the foremost poet of democratic,
progressive, optimistic, and exuberant nineteenth-century New York—
also of course, the artist most closely associated with celebrating
the rhapsodic American ideal of progress, union, and democracy—
Whitman has become the “ideal” official spokesman for the
Brooklyn Bridge. That his written statements about the bridge produce
an image at once “complex” and “ambiguous”—
more “antipathy” than “advocacy”— has
often seemed irrelevant. For writers wishing to provide direct evidence
of Whitman’s approval, such quotes as “The shapes arise!”
(from “Song of the Broad-Axe,” and used by Kenneth Clark,
David McCullough amongst many others) have often proved irresistible.
Yet this line first appeared in 1856 when it was included in the second
edition of Leaves of Grass. Although pre-dating the legislation that
established the New York and Brooklyn Bridge Company by eleven years,
and pre-dating the beginning of construction by thirteen years, the
phrase fits the parameters of official cultural expression: if the quote
fits the “ideal,” print it.
…. Whitman’s legacy shows that strong tensions exist in
our archive of responses to the bridge. At no time was this more obvious
than in the forms, practices, and rhetoric of the bridge’s opening
day. The bridge’s dedication ceremony was a glaring attempt to
direct and define the terms through which the bridge would be discussed
and represented. And it was a major success. As an event, it consecrated
a language and a set of perceptions that continue to dominate cultural
interpretations of the Brooklyn Bridge. From the opening day this study
proceeds through the bridge’s representational history utilizing
a wide range of cultural media: commemorative practices, oratory, visual
arts, guidebooks and travelogues, film, journalism, autobiography, imaginative
literature, and structural, popular, and critical history. Such important
themes as national ideology, immigration and tourism, technological
iconography and urban perception, historical memory and commemorative
ritual, and rededication and revisionism are considered in relation
to the bridge. It concludes with a brief assessment of the period from
9/11 to the blackout of 2003, two events with deep implications for
the Brooklyn Bridge. …
In presenting the tensions in the bridge’s cultural history, one
can focus on two broad forms of response. …. expressions of assent
and of dissent. By glorifying the Brooklyn Bridge as an exemplary American
icon, assenting voices have affirmed Filler’s claim. Yet this
assent has often involved a studied avoidance of physical, social, and
economic context. Under the assenting gaze, the bridge is transformed:
from a bustling city spot to a depopulated, aestheticized showcase for
American technological and economic progress; in effect, a perfect art
object, an American version of Keats’ “well-wrought urn.”
As Bodnar explained in Remaking America, dissenting voices on the other
hand have criticized this approach and sought to contextualize the bridge
as a profoundly public, communal place. By prioritizing the city’s
vast humanity over its technological iconography, they have fashioned
a “vernacular” image of the bridge that is essentially anthropocentric
[as does the Russian poet, Vladimere Mayakowsky when he calls it a giant
monster or dinosaur of the harbor. Many poets, like Gioseffi, have chosen
to address the bridge as an anthropomorphic entity, using the third
person “you.”] Yet in the same vein, these dissenters have
perhaps proved themselves more faithful to the spirit of the bridge,
and most especially to its unique central walkway. For it is only when
we relate our public monuments to the human life that teems around them,
that we can approximate the raw optimism and happy acceptance of difference
that has so often defined the promise of New York….
On May 24, 1883, after fourteen years of arduous work, the Great East
River Bridge between the independent cities of New York and Brooklyn
was dedicated and declared open to the public. Given the auspicious
nature of the event, the city celebrated in grand style. A parade was
staged, speeches were given and the day ended with an hour-long fireworks
display. U.S. President Chester Arthur and New York Governor Grover
Cleveland attended the festivities and the event was widely reported
in the local, national and international press. On the whole, these
press reports stressed the visible and voluble assent of the people;
everywhere was found joy and celebration, veneration and approval. Subsequent
commentators have echoed these sentiments. For historians, the opening
of the Brooklyn Bridge was a seminal event. The structure represented
an unparalleled technological achievement and embodied a remarkable
municipal consensus. After the ravages of the Civil War, the divisions
of the resultant economy, the political malfeasance of Tammany Hall,
and the conflicts occasioned by new mass immigration, the bridge seemed
to unite the two cities’ diverse peoples and heal their open wounds.
In truth, the bridge’s dedication was a tightly controlled municipal
event saturated with ideological considerations. While it is not unusual
for an urban population to celebrate and commend the completion of public
works, the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge had been highly controversial.
From the onset, alarm, criticism, and protest accompanied the bridge
project. During construction, hazardous working conditions accounted
for over thirty lives, while scores more suffered permanent disability.
In the political and financial arenas, the bridge’s construction
history was littered with fraud, delay, uncertainty, and mistrust. In
the months leading up to the opening, criticism was widespread and,
just days before the opening, many of the city’s newspapers reported
that public confidence was very low. An unveiling ceremony might have
reversed such doubts. Yet the bridge had emerged over the course of
fourteen years and its appearance was new to nobody. In retrospect,
the rate with which commendation replaced denigration was almost instantaneous,
and in this context, universal approval would seem more than a little
unusual.
…. It is impossible to separate the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge
from the context of its times. Begun in the aftermath of the Civil War,
and continued through Reconstruction and the beginnings of the Gilded
Age, the bridge’s construction and dedication spanned an era of
fluctuating cultural power. Debates raged over the meaning of America,
the management of social order was both honed and refined. … As
a civic occasion, the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge stands in the same
historical tradition as the Federal Procession in 1788 and the opening
ceremonies of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the Croton Aqueduct in 1842.
Although occasions marking genuine civic improvement, these civic rituals
were framed by concerns over municipal definition and display. The Federal
Procession was over a mile and a half long and showcased many of the
city’s trades and occupations. Likewise, at the celebrations for
the Erie Canal and the Croton Aqueduct, parades were mounted that were
both long and inclusive. (The best descriptions of the parades attending
the Federal Procession, the Erie Canal and the Croton Aqueduct can be
found in Brooks McNamara, Day of Jubilee: The Great Age of Public Celebrations
in New York, 1788 – 1909 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University
Press, 1997.)
By comparison, the Brooklyn Bridge parade was extremely short. Composed
of President Arthur, Governor Cleveland, their respective staffs, and
two branches of the New York state militia, the parade highlighted only
the government and its military wing. Unlike in 1788, 1825, or 1842,
no workers--from engineers, through craftsmen to manual laborers—
were included in the parade. Moreover, they were not invited to either
the formal ceremonies or the official speeches. …. At the time
of optimum publicity, those who had built the bridge were excluded from
view. Consequently, they received none of the limelight and no direct
acclaim….
At the opening of the bridge, only the military and the government took
part, while most onlookers were relegated to peripheral locations offering
poor views. In addition, some of the day’s most important events
were witnessed only by a select few: the day’s orations, the experience
of walking the bridge and the exclusive receptions at the houses of
Washington Roebling and Seth Low. Whether President Arthur even wished
to make contact with those at the exclusive receptions is debatable.
With derision, The Daily Graphic noted: “Mayor Low urges upon
the citizens at the reception not to shake hands with the President.
The power of the right arm of the Chief Executive is limited, and he
desires to return to Washington whole and sound with all his members
intact,” reported The Daily Graphic, May 23, 1883.
As many papers pointed out, direct experience of the day’s events
would only be available through the newspapers….. In formulating
and presenting opinion, the orators and the press failed to canvas the
public. Although championed as leading actors in the bridge’s
construction and celebration, the general population instead served
as the day’s audience. Their job was to do the listening, not
the talking; to take note, not to spell out. While references to democracy
abounded, the active participation of the people— the defining
ideal of democracy— was denied.
Those responsible for the day engineered an image of the bridge as the
American symbol par excellence. Public opinion was neutralized, and
the organizers wove an exemplary narrative of the American errand that
“naturally” culminated in the towering icon of the bridge.
This image did not conform to the state of American society, but posited
an ulterior, almost mythic, state-of-the-union address. Its message
was that through commerce and a belief in the existing forms of American
polity, the nation would continue from glory to glory. As union and
completion were stressed, divisive recent history and individual dissent
were both dispelled. Concomitantly, the traumatic and suspicious, not
to mention corrupt, process through which the bridge, and American society,
had recently traveled became subsumed into the structure’s marvelous
sublimity. America had arrived at this historical point with this visual
image, and the character of the country was reduced to a form of single-issue
binary politics. ….
The unity proclaimed at the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge was not a
spontaneous expression of assent, but formulated, shaped, and staged
by a group of influential New Yorkers. Tirelessly repeated by the press
and sanctioned by subsequent historians, it has found its way into our
shared cultural memory. With each new addition to our historical understanding,
the manufactured assent of the opening day has become canonized as the
dominant interpretation. What we witness at the opening of the Brooklyn
Bridge follows Albert Boime in The Unveiling of the National Icons observs
that “the history of each [U.S.] icon reveals that privileged
members of the American hierarchy, bent on maintaining their economic
and social class advantages, attempted to appropriate the symbols of
America almost from their inception and use them to stimulate an illusion
of inclusivity.”…. The grand style urban vision flourished
outside the visual realm as well as within it. Writers also transformed
the bridge into a purely aesthetic icon….. On the rare occasions
that the city’s human context found its way into literary renditions
of the bridge, it was accompanied by a profound ambivalence. While gazing
out at the span, H.G. Wells concluded that the “unmeaning faces”
of “the individuals [he saw] count[ed] for nothing.” In
Impressions of America 1923, Sergei Esenin felt no regret “that
wild Hiawatha no longer hunts his deer here. And … that the hand
of the builders of this culture was sometimes cruel.” Charles
Reznikoff’s poetry in Rhythms (New York:1918) provides the logical
extension of this:
On Brooklyn Bridge I saw a man drop dead.
It meant no more than if he were a sparrow;
For tower on tower behind the bridge arose
The buildings on Manhattan, tall white towers
Agleam with lights; below, the wide blue bay
Stretched out to meet the high blue sky
and the first white star.
…. The lives and deaths of the city’s population become
insignificant when placed against the backdrop of the built environment.
These responses are salient, yet for others ambivalence developed into
active distaste. In Marrion Wilcox’s 1894 poem “North and
South from the Brooklyn Bridge,” the poet is exhilarated by the
view from the bridge, yet revolted by the surrounding area: “A
poisonous forest of houses as far as he eye can see, / And in their
shade / All crime is made.”….
For Don Marquis in “The Almost Perfect State,” from Great
Essays of All Nations (edited by F.H Pritchard, London: George G. Harrap,
1929) the city’s “detail” ruins the exemplary image
of the city from the bridge.… In “From the Bridge”
Marquis raised the thorny question of context, yet finds an easy resolution
for the skyline’s inherent contradictions. In Dreams and Dust
(New York: Harpers and Bros., 1915, the beauty of the result nullifies
the sordid means of creation:
Held and thrilled by the vision
I stood, as the twilight died, …
Built by a lawless breed;
Builded of lust for power,
Builded of gold and greed.
Risen out of the trader’s
Brutal and sordid wars--
And yet, behold! a city
Wonderful under the stars.
In common with “From the Bridge,” Marquis’ “The
Towers of Manhattan” from The Book of New York Verse, edited by
Hamilton F. Armstrong (New York: Putnam, 1917) unfolds at twilight,
stressing the city as a heightened aesthetic experience. While “on
the middle arch of the bridge,” Marquis writes: “before
me apparelled in splendor, / Banded with loops of light, / Clothed on
with purple and magic / Rose the tall towers of Manhattan.” Richard
Le Gallienne’s “Brooklyn Bridge at Dawn” strikes a
similar chord. Le Gallienne’s bridge has “not yet a soul”
upon it. Equally, he reconfigures the bridge’s relation to context;
the realism of creation is cast as the stuff of dreams: “Who,
seeing thus the bridge a-slumber there, / Would dream such softness,
like a picture hung, / Is wrought of human thunder, iron and blood?”….
The publication of Le Gallienne’s poem in Metropolitan Magazine
23 (1905) set a cultural precedent. Published alongside two photographs
by Alvin Langdon Coburn, it represents one of the first attempts to
describe the bridge simultaneously through poetry and photography. In
this respect it anticipated the text that would most influence the image
of the bridge for historians of American culture, Hart Crane’s
use of Walker Evans’ photographs in his epic poem The Bridge (1930)….
The Brooklyn Bridge is and was an integral part of American history
for poets [such as Hart Crane, Garcia Lorca or more recently, Harvey
Shapiro, Daniela Gioseffi, Alfred Corn, Cynthia Hogue, and Grace Shulman,
as well as many others.] Unlike those responsible for official commemoration,
poets articulated complex, vernacular responses to the bridge. By no
means “stripped … of its ties with American life,”
the bridge stands as its center. Both “renovated and thoroughly
ventilated,” it is refreshed and ready to synthesize the nation’s
historical detritus. Hnery Miller’s evocation of the bridge, however,
surrounds the bridge with “debris,” not symbols of achievement
and progress as was the political sloganeering of the time. . Rubbish
and wreckage mark out Miller’s “American life,” and
they all “flowed into” the Brooklyn Bridge.
In Tropic of Capricorn,1939, Miller linked the bridge to more
significant aspects of American history. While journeying over the bridge
with his friend Hymie, Miller states: “For him the skyscrapers
had been built, the wilderness cleared, the Indians massacred, the buffaloes
exterminated; for him the twin cities had been joined by the Brooklyn
Bridge, the caissons sunk, the cables strung from tower to tower; …
for him the anesthetic was invented.” Here, Miller revises the
era’s dominant ideas about progress and expansion. The values
championed at the bridge’s opening are converted into acts of
brutality and ruthless imperialism. Furthermore, they all are linked
to a tradition of historical anesthesia. ….In his essay “The
Brooklyn Bridge,” Miller states that Roebling’s span was
“destructive of hope and longing,” and—revising the
harp image favored by Hart Crane, Mumford, and, at the 1954 re-opening,
by Meyer Berger—called the bridge “the harp of death.”….
Miller wrote as a form of anti-commemoration; what he produced was a
both a reminder of and a remedy for American anesthesia. In place of
the deadening fiction of exemplary progress, Miller positioned the painful
legacy of violent expansion.
Harvey Shapiro’s poem “National Cold Storage Company”
from Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 1997)— written
in response to the death of President Kennedy in 1963— links American
historical violence to the bridge:
The National Cold Storage Company contains
More things than you can dream of.
Hard by the Brooklyn Bridge it stands
In a litter of freight cars,
Tugs to one side; the other, the traffic
Of the Long Island Expressway.
I myself have dropped into it in seven years
Midnight tossings, plans for escape, the shakes.
Add to this the national total --
Grant’s tomb, the Civil War, Arlington,
The Young President’s dead.
Above the warehouse and beneath the stars
The poets creep on the harp of the Bridge.
But
see,
They fall into the National Cold Storage Company
One by one. The wind off the river is too cold,
Or the times too rough, or the Bridge
Is not a harp at all. Or maybe
A monstrous birth inside the warehouse
Must be fed by everything--ships, poems,
Stars, all the years of our lives.
Shapiro’s America resembles a cultural Frankenstein’s monster.
In line with James’, Wells’, and Huneker’s depictions,
the bridge is “monstrous”; and like Miller, Shapiro revises
the familiar harp imagery used to glorify the bridge. Although Shapiro’s
bridge is not the center of the nation’s debris, it is the conduit
through which everything flows: it is a vital national artery. The title
of Shapiro’s American repository is vital. Singularly “National,”
the entity is also a corporate venture,“Company”. “Hard
by the Brooklyn Bridge,” the National Cold Storage Company is
also an American monument. Yet it is an explicitly secretive one. Situated
incognito, it represents the national archive as covert culture, more
F.B.I. file-center than Smithsonian Institution. Additionally, Shapiro’s
“midnight tossings” add a hint of nightmare to the “monstrous
birth.” This sense of horror is reflected in “the national
total”: death, war, and murder--not progress and prosperity--connote
America’s achievement.
At once paradoxical and ironic, Shapiro’s key images are derived
from the American commemorative tradition. The company is equally a
“Cold Storage” unit and a national furnace. The nation’s
symbols, artifacts, and debris are destroyed in order to fuel the larger,
“frozen” image of America. Its poets--surely a reference
to Hart Crane--are fooled into “creep[ing]” on the bridge.
It is a perilous activity, and their paeans to beauty energize only
the nation’s self-image while destroying the poet. Molded by the
ashes of history, Shapiro’s American ritual of assent begets “a
monstrous birth”; important details become a vestige of the petrified,
unchanging body of America.
Daniela Gioseffi appears to be making a similar point when she writes,
“the American Dream leapt from your cables / and fell down a deep
elevator shaft / of the warehouse that hides you from view,” in
her poem “To the Brooklyn Bridge,” in Brooklyn Bridge Poetry
Walk: A Souvenir Anthology, edited by her and distributed on the First
Brooklyn Bridge Poetry Walk, June 25, 1972, in the Brooklyn Collection,
Brooklyn Public Library.
By situating the bridge within an alternative historical tradition,
Miller, Shapiro, and Gioseffi provide a significant counter-narrative
to that offered at the opening and at subsequent commemorations. And
by doing so, they join an American literary tradition that is similarly
imaginative yet more overtly historical. ….
Their contributions help to assess how cultural memory plays against
national history.
….the bridge enjoyed something of a renaissance in the 1970s.
Throughout the decade, the structure was subject to remarkable commemoration.
In 1971, the city held a three-day celebration to mark the bridge’s
88th birthday which led The New York Times to wonder “why an 88th
anniversary should have touched off so heavy a municipal extravagance?”
The following year, Daniela Gioseffi inaugurated the Brooklyn Bridge
Poetry Walk, an event now produced annually by the New York-based Poet’s
House, and in 1973, The Municipal Engineers Journal devoted an entire
issue to the bridge. In 1976, the bridge was lovingly re-imagined by
the artist Red Grooms in his madcap installation Ruckus Manhattan. The
following year, the bridge was an integral part of the box-office phenomena
Saturday Night Fever. Juxtaposed with the darkly menacing Verrazano
Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge represented an avenue of escape: from gritty,
working-class Brooklyn to the Promised Land of Manhattan. By 1978, the
bridge’s revival reached something of an apotheosis. In Sidney
Lumet’s The Wiz, the bridge was reconfigured as a section of L.
Frank Baum’s yellow brick road.
America’s historical imagination has consistently revisited the
significance of the building of the Brooklyn Bridge. Commemorative events,
journalism, and certain historical fictions have enacted a collective
ritual of assent. They have adopted the consensus interpretation of
technological progress and confirmed the essential soundness of the
national venture. Through the theme of bridge building, these cultural
artifacts have fashioned a unified vision of historical order while
eliding the complexities of social context. Discussing the nature of
national traditions, M.J. Bowen could equally be describing Steve Brodie’s
leap or the building of the Brooklyn Bridge: “The people of regions
and the nation itself tended to congratulate and glorify themselves,
adopting ennobling self-images and embarking upon legend-building campaigns.
The dearth of eyewitnesses to the real past often produced an increasingly
sharp curve of erasure of memory of the original actual … conditions,
giving rise to an … invented tradition … so deeply internalized
by a nation / group that is practically impervious to scholarship that
shows it to be largely factitious.” Carl Rosenstock, Brooklyn
poet, commemorates Steve Brodie’s leap in his poem titled in part
“A Suite of Dances.”
Against the ritualized rhetoric of “legend-building” stands
an equally vital tradition. The authors of these counter-narratives
have followed the advice offered by Alfred North Whitehead in 1927:
“The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of
the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision ….
Those societies which can not combine reverence to their symbols with
freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from
the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows.” They have
measured American progress by social values and historical complexity,
not technological accomplishment. Through the lens of historical rigor
and personal identification, these authors have stated that, like Brodie’s
jump and the selling of the bridge, the unified vision of technological
progress had “little basis in fact.” The essence of this
criticism is found in the national propensity to elide the conflicts
of context. Those working in the consensus tradition have constructed
their histories around such assertions as Clarke’s “all
modern, all heroic New York started with Brooklyn Bridge.” Others
have taken the era’s nefarious alliance of politics, finance,
and industry as their “prehistory”; staggering levels of
public corruption and the rise of the economic titan defined the Gilded
Age. For these authors, the building of the bridge brought into vivid
relief the gulf between historical memory and historical fact, and dispelled
the opening day’s claims of unity and brotherhood. They have taken
the unified vision of historical order, the exemplary image of American
progress, and by restating its complexities have shown it for the historical
mischief it is. Dissatisfied with printing the legend, a number of writers
have sought “to enrich historical understanding” by first
imagining, then interpreting the facts. [Throughout the century since
it’s opening, many poets have done the same portraying both the
positive and negative aspects of The Great Bridge with its cargo of
historical change. ]
America’s historical continuity has dominated cultural arguments--and
cultural wars--for the past twenty years. The debate clarifies what
relationship, if any, can be said to exist between nineteenth-century
America and its twentieth-century incarnation? Is the passage from one
to the other a seamless, linear tale of continued national progress,
or a complex tale of rupture and entropy? As regards the Brooklyn Bridge,
the centennial unsurprisingly stressed the former, as have a number
of recent critics. In 1997, Robert Hughes asserted that “the bridge
summed up the whole burgeoning imagery of benign industrial capitalism
shedding its benefits on society.” Such claims correspond to a
specific American self-image. In the nineteenth century, “Canals,
steamboats, mechanized power machinery, locomotives, and the telegraph
were repeatedly cited as evidence that the human mind could penetrate
the surface of nature, unlock its secrets, and therefore put more and
more natural processes to use for human purposes.”
In Underworld, released the same year as Hughes’ American
Visions, Don DeLillo disagreed. Discussing the Fresh Kills landfill
site on Staten Island, the largest base-to-summit rubbish dump in the
world, and the highest point on the U.S. Eastern Seaboard, DeLillo proclaimed
that New York’s various “bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs,
graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade
and linkage were directed in the end to this great culminating structure.”
Here, the “benefits” of “benign industrial capitalism”
are literally garbage. Where nineteenth-century America put the engineer
at the forefront of America’s quest for political and social liberation,
DeLillo places him at the rear, responsible not as a social leader,
but as its garbage man, charged with overseeing society’s waste.
Furthermore, just as “all the great works of [American] transport,
trade and linkage” led to the conquest of the West in the nineteenth
century, in DeLillo’s twentieth century they lead back to the
East Coast’s largest garbage pile. In the nineteenth century,
the engineer represented the harbinger of history, in DeLillo the engineer
trails behind Walter Benjamin’s “angel of history”:
a slave to the litter produced by contemporary consumer society.69 Predating
Alexis Rockman, DeLillo signals a break in the continuity of the American
ritual of assent: the logical result of Manifest Destiny is a landfill,
not a garden.
In Americana (1971)— signifying the very stuff of American
culture— DeLillo began his inquiry into the linear version of
American historical continuity. His subject was the changes wrought
in the post-World War II American landscape: “We wish to blast
all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless
identical structures …. We want to be totally engulfed by all
the so-called worst elements of our national life and culture ….
We want to come to terms with the false anger we so often display at
the increasing signs of sterility and violence in our culture. Kill
the old brownstones and ornate railroad terminals. Kill the rotten stinking
smalltown courthouses. Blow up the Brooklyn Bridge.”70 As a New
Yorker, DeLillo had witnessed entire rows of nineteenth-century brownstones
torn down to make way for new commercial development and often poorly
planned public housing. The process found its nadir with the destruction
of Pennsylvania Station in 1963, described by both Lewis Mumford and
Daniel Moynihan as “the greatest act of civic vandalism”
in New York history. Such events where clearly on DeLillo’s mind
when he began to write his first novel. In Americana, history’s
advance brings depreciation, not improvement, and progress is defined
by destruction. The observation is aptly summarized in Ada Louise Huxtable’s
version of New York’s “civic vandalism”: “Pennsylvania
Station succumbed to progress at the age of fifty-six, after a lingering
decline.” If “progress” could seal the fate of McKim,
Mead, and White’s great railroad terminal, would the Brooklyn
Bridge be next? And, more important, would anybody care?
Certainly, Daniela Gioseffi and Harvey Shapiro would. To these poets,
cited earlier, the bridge was one of New York’s greatest treasures,
precisely because of the contemporary U.S. scene. Written the year after
Americana was published, Gioseffi, in 1972, used the bridge
to contrast the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries:
you beautiful monster of the harbor,
now a cultural symbol
bridging Whitman’s age of hope
to our age of anxiety and despair …
I walk over you and cough out the thick air
that muffles your “choiring strings”--
the smoke that hazes the beauty Crane knew …
I walk suspended by the ghost of all that could have been
since you were christened by the city
and a country
where Lorca’s worst nightmares
have come true.
And in 1978, Shapiro cast his eye on the history of “Whitman’s
crummy fish-shaped island”:
… opening the Bridge!
Fireworks and exultation! Crowds moving
In a mighty congress back and forth.
While we, unmoving on the starry grid of America,
Stare failure in the face, our blazing star.
Gioseffi and Shapiro celebrate the bridge as an icon of nostalgia. As
they gaze on the bridge, they honor the memory of what the U.S. once
was and mourn what it has become. Both authors explicitly contrast the
era of the bridge’s creation and 1970s America; equally, both
find no similarities. History is the source of their lament. From “hope”
to “anxiety,” “exultation” to “failure,”
the course of American history is defined as entropy not improvement…
In Cynthia Hogue’s poem “Crossing Brooklyn Bridge”
(1994), the idea of help and history are intertwined. Walking home across
the bridge, Hogue happens upon a young homeless man intent on ending
his life. In many popular histories, the act of leaping from the bridge
is treated as folly and remembered as trivia. This is not the case in
Hogue’s poem. Like Bud Korpening in Dos Passos’ Manhattan
Transfer, the young man seems to have been consumed by the city’s
cutthroat environment, and his condition--“I saw how thin he was
/ and young, and helpless”— is essentially tragic, not trivial.
Hogue describes a profound human moment, and her immediate response
is sympathy. Accounting no difference with the young man, the narrator
invites him home and progress is made. Yet their accord is shattered:
Then the police got me out of the way
and crawled toward him.
He said Leave me alone,
and, You make another move
I’ll Jump. They came on
because they’d heard those words
a thousand times and never
when they were meant.
With a final, defiant gesture, the young man jumps. Hogue’s story
is of identification, of sympathy sought and realized. Yet it is also
about ascribing difference, and the devastating impact it can have.
Hogue’s act of sympathy and identification are thwarted by those
meant to protect and serve.
The title of Hogue’s poem is a direct reference to Whitman’s
“Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” Hogue’s narrator and the
young man can, in this light, be seen as the embodiment of futurity
envisioned in Whitman’s poem: “you that shall cross from
shore to shore hence …. The others that are to follow me.”Unfortunately,
so can the police. In “Crossing Brooklyn Bridge,” Whitman’s
role as adviser, counselor, friend, and helpmate is overrun by the bureaucratic
steel of official policing. Where Hogue offers sympathy and identification,
the police offer disregard and disinterest. They have the advantage,
and the valuable lessons of Whitman’s “metropolitan pantheism”
are lost in the modern environment. Within this framework, “Crossing
Brooklyn Bridge” is bleak indeed, and it highlights the extent
to which Whitman’s nineteenth-century idealism has been debased
in the late-twentieth-century urban landscape. Equally, Hogue’s
question is the same as Gioseffi’s: how could “Whitman’s
age of hope” lead to “our age of anxiety and despair”?
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Edited by Daniela Gioseffi & Richard Haw |
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