As it happened, New York had a huge suspension bridge – the Manhattan Bridge – under construction and nearing completion when Scientific American published its New York issue in 1908. The beginning of the description is, depending on your view, a bit sad or a bit presumptuous: “The third of the great crossings of the East River, known as the Manhattan Bridge, which is located about a quarter of a mile to the east of the old Brooklyn Bridge, is now in process of erection…” The old Brooklyn Bridge was all of 25 years old in 1908 and has a longer main span than the newer bridge.
The second bridge was the Williamsburg Bridge, further north up the river, and it had, in 1908, the longest main span of any suspension bridge in the world. The Brooklyn Bridge’s main span is 5 feet shorter, and the Manhattan Bridge another 115 feet shorter than that. For a few years, the three longest main spans in suspension bridges were these three bridges, which is more a statement of the difficulties in bridging the East River than anything else.
The fourth bridge on the river wasn’t a suspension bridge: the Queensboro (AKA Queensborough, AKA Blackwell’s Island) Bridge is five-span cantilever truss. That already put it at an aesthetic disadvantage compared to the suspension bridges, but the location of its four towers was dictated by geography (on the Queens and Manhattan shores, and on either side of Roosevelt Island) and the Manhattan landscape is hillier than the Queens side. It’s asymmetrical in both span length and slope. Of course if you take a photo at an angle, it’s hard to see that.
More bridges would follow – including two more record-breaking suspension bridges at George Washington and Verrazzano Narrows, and a record-breaking railroad arch at Hell Gate – but the pattern was already established. The kind of huge bridges that had been rare and geographically scattered in the nineteenth century were being built again and again in New York because that was necessary to keep both street and ship traffic moving.
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