Brooklyn Bridge Walk

There's no better walk. Make it, some late summer evening, a little whip of wind across the East River. You arrive from the Brooklyn side. In the distance is Manhattan, where the sun goes down like a giant red aspirin behind the jagged skyline.
The buildings themselves are a memory of what has gone before. Further down the harbour, you can see the figure of the Statue of Liberty, as if to say some things fall, some survive.

As the sunlight fades, the dark restores another sense of mystery to the city. Whole skyscrapers power up. The FDR Drive becomes a smash of moving car lights, like a Pollack painting. If you look down at your feet – through the wooden floorboards of the bridge – you can see the East River running darkly below. And if you glance up into the sky you can see airplanes streaking across, perhaps even one or two stars clawmarking the black.

The Brooklyn Bridge allows a sense of all arrivals. The traffic thrums across, loud and ugly. But the pedestrian walkway is one level above the traffic and so there is a sense of transcendence. The river below gives a feeling of ancient welcome, as if we have all come here, at one time, on ships. Below the river runs the subway. It is as if – while crossing the 500 metre expanse - you have become all forms of transport, and that the bridge itself works not only on its literal but also its deepest metaphorical level.

Whitman wrote about it. Kerouac. Marianne Moore. David McCullough. Pete Hamill.

'And we have seen night lifted in thine arms,' said Hart Crane in his great homage. When the Russian poet Mayakovsky visited New York in 1925 he stood above the river, looking along the harp-strung expanse of columns and cables, eager to get to the essence of this strange country, some of which he found in the stretch, the jaunt, the breadth of the bridge.

'From these praises, blush redder than the flag of our own soil,' wrote the Russian, who found no other building in America that thrilled him quite as much.
As a work of architecture the bridge is a bundle of stories. It was designed by John Roebling who obviously felt that greatness was a lack of fear. He dreamed the structure big. At the time, it was the longest suspension bridge in the world, and its two granite towers were the largest in the Western hemisphere. Construction began on 3 January 1890, during New York's 'heroic age'. It was completed 13 years later at the cost of $15 million and about 30 lives, many of them Irish immigrants. The caissons were made from rot-resistant yellow pine wood which means that, even today, tens of thousands of tons of masonry rest on a 140 year-old piece of lumber at the bottom of the East River.

There were no skyscrapers in the city at the time. The bridge towers rose high above the river. People who walked across in the early years professed that they felt they were floating on air.
Still today, a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge is an existential jaunt. It manages to stretch between what was and what might be, between what is and what should have been.

One of its true beauties of the bridge is the pattern of steel cables strung like a harpsichord along the side of the bridge. It is like encountering a giant music sheet.
Sounds and stories.

At times it makes you realise what a disastrous era we live in – imagine the Bush cronies trying even to conceive of something so powerful.
Talking of Bush, the bridge has attracted its fair share of madmen and murderers. It has been a target in endless terrorist schemes - in 2003, a truck driver was sentenced to 20 years in prison for providing material support to al-Qaeda, for a plot to destroy the bridge by cutting through its support wires with blowtorches. Endless suicides have tumbled from on high. And, of course, it has been famously sold over and over again to those who are gullible to its gothic beauty.

But the true beauty of Brooklyn Bridge is in its ability to inspire silence. Let's face it – New York has never been gifted with the idea of being able to bestow quiet. But stroll across the Brooklyn Bridge when the sunlight is red on the steel chords. Or jog across in the early morning when the moon is falling over the riverside warehouses. Or spin across on a nighttime bike ride. There is always somebody else there. A shadow. A lurking figure. An entwined couple. There is no such thing as absolute aloneness in New York, but somehow this allows us an access to a certain humility. The world is not entirely ours and never will be.

For just a second or two, we can stand apart and listen. The wind whistles through the wires – a New York moment, unbidden, unmatchable. And then the car horns start blaring in the distance, the barges whistle, the planes break the sightline, and New Yorkers begin pushing past you, brash and fast. The tiny curfewed moment is gone, though not that easily forgotten, like the bridge itself, and what it represents: some time ago, some time to come.