The Great East River Suspension Bridge
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Before the completion of the Brooklyn Bridge in 1883, a New York toy-manufacturer, Stirn & Lyon, rendered this nineteenth-century engineering masterpiece as a toy. From the beginning of its construction in 1869 until its inauguration, the Brooklyn Bridge received publicity of every kind, from local to international, from apprehension about its safety and stability to awe at the magnitude of its engineering achievements. 1 Prior to its opening, a fleet of ferry boots had been completing over a thousand crossings a day to transport more than one hundred thousand commuters between Brooklyn and Manhattan. The bridge held promise of an easier and safer way across.
The first suspension bridge to be constructed with steel cables, the Brooklyn Bridge also had a steel floor reinforced with a view to accommodating the heavy New York Central locomotives that planners of the time intended to run across it. While this plan was never realized, the reinforced floor proved invaluable later when the cable cars and horse-drawn vehicles of the lime were replaced by the automobile. 2 With towers that were among the tallest structures on the continent and a span that was the longest in the world, 3 the bridge had an immense impact on the boroughs of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and on the daily lives of their inhabitants.
When in 1881 Wesley W. Barnes of Stirn & Lyon applied for a patent for a toy bridge, he described “a novel and instructive toy for children in the nature of o miniature suspension-bridge, which is adapted to be readily taken to pieces and set up again by a child, thus affording both amusement and instruction, while it develops the constructive faculties.”
1 Mary J. Shapiro, A Picture History of the Brooklyn Bridge, New York, Dover, 1983, p. v.
2 Ibid, p. v.
3 The Great East River Bridge 1883-1983, New York, Brooklyn Museum, 1983, p. 10.
