Three Ages, Three Materials

The north side of the Manhattan approach to the Brooklyn Bridge:

From the cable anchorage to the end, most of the roadway is carried on this masonry arcade, with steel bridges at the streets. John Roebling’s original idea, back when the bridge was a private company, was to rent the vaults as warehsoue space. I don’t know if that ever happened. Some were used by the city government for dead storage, although I believe they’re now all empty.^[1]

So the granite arcade is original as are the brick walls enclosing the vaults. The brick infill at the doors in those walls came later. The cantilevered steel beams above are part of the highway connection from the bridge to the FDR drive, and were built in the 1960s.

1. What I would give to rent one as our office…↩︎