Perspective Based On Geography

When the Brooklyn Bridge was in construction, and when it was new, there were any number of reports on how incredibly tall it was. To be fair, the bridges towers were the second and third tallest structures in the city when first built, with only the spire of Trinity Church being higher, but the towers are not in the middle of the city, but rather out at the edges of the East River. Here’s a view from a three-story building (the old Hall of Records in City Hall Park) during construction in 1881, and, yes, the Manhattan tower is tall but the overwhelming feeling of the bridge is the outward sweep of the deck:

A better argument for height is this stereograph from a few years later, apparently taken from the third floor or roof of a South Street loft. You still have the long horizontal curve of the deck, but both towers have, in Louis Sullivan’s phrase, “the force and power of altitude…the glory and pride of exaltation…”

If you’re on the ground, at the eastern fringe of Manhattan on South Street or inland at the approach end at Park Row, the deck rises above you. At South Street it’s overhead already; inland you see it rising in the mid-distance. This is true because lower Manhattan is fairly flat: at Park Row you’re about 30 feet above high tide and at South Street less than 10 feet, while the bridge deck midspan is about 130 feet. I’m mentioning that as an introduction to the view that triggered this blog post. Here’s 181st Street looking west:

Some nice New Law tenements and the George Washington Bridge in the background. Two blocks west of where I was standing, the plateau of Washington Heights abruptly ends in a steep slope down to the Hudson. The A train station I got out at is about 215 feet above high tide; the intersection of Cabrini and 181st in front of me is about 185 feet up, the lower deck of the bridge is about 210 feet up. In other words, if you live in this area, you spend at least some of your time looking out and down at the bridge rather than out and up. It changes, I think, your perception of the structure. The main span of the GWB is more than twice as long as that of Brooklyn; the towers are more than twice as tall. But from the adjoining neighborhood (as opposed to Riverside Park, clinging to that cliff), the bridge seems less intimidating. More approachable, maybe, even though physically it is harder to reach.