The Other End

Last week, I was talking about a postcard showing the Manhattan end of the Brooklyn Bridge. From 1912, here’s the Brooklyn end:

The photo that this was based on is probably a year or two older than that, since we should be seeing the Woolworth Building and we’re not. The curve to the approach was there from the start and is there today, but the two upper tiers of steel – the structure to connect the elevated trains (red) and trolleys (brown and tan) to the bridge, and the structure to carry the power catenaries above the trolleys – are long gone. The elevated ran in the innermost portions of the deck directly on either side of the central pedestrian walkway, and the trolleys ran in the middle portion of the deck on each side, leaving the outer portion as one lane devoted to carriages, cars, wagons, and trucks. Note the two-to-one ratio of mass transit to private vehicles.

You can see the pedestrians in the middle where the curve straightens out. If you’ve never been on the bridge: the pedestrian path is elevated to the top of the vehicular traffic once you get past the approach, so you would have been above the trains the same way you are now above the cars. And I believe that only cable-powered and electric trains ever ran on the bridge, os you wouldn’t have had a face full of coal smoke, either.