Fly Like A Bird

From 1915 or so, a postcard showing the Brooklyn Bridge:

I suspect this was hand-painted over a photo. The detail of the bridge would be very difficult to get this accurate without a guide, but the Woolworth Building (the tallest in sight) and the Municipal Building on the far right are represented in a surprisingly crude manner. Similarly, the top of Bankers Trust is shown as an actual pyramid rather than the stepped pyramid it is.

The angle is interesting. There’s a steep bluff above the East River south of the bridge – the hill from Columbia Heights down to Furman Street – but there really isn’t anything like that north of the bridge, where we’re standing. The slope from Brooklyn Heights down to what’s now called Dumbo is gradual, so no view like this was possible from the ground then or now. Another possibility is that the photographer was at the roof or a window of one of the big industrial buildings that were constructed in Dumbo early in the 1900s. For example, the angle of this view is about right for the Gair Company warehouse at 1 Main Street, which was completed in 1914. It’s very unlikely that this was based on a photo taken from an airplane.

Also, note the navy ship with a lattice mast passing under the bridge. The first of those went into service in 1910, and they were mostly phased out in the 1920s.

The back of the card shows that hucksterism has always been around:

No one – and I mean literally no one – cares what the overall length of the Brooklyn Bridge is, because no one cares about the approaches. The main span is 1596 feet, and the suspended side spans (between the towers and the anchorages) are each 930 feet. The main span length and the total suspended span of 3456 feet are of some interest and are the reason the bridge was considered a record-breaker. The land approaches are, at best, boring.