Copyright information: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu/press_copyright_and_disclaimer/default.html
The Allure of the Bridge
We each have an individual experience and reaction to bridges. There is the pride of achievement that comes from erecting something tangible and lasting, something that reflects the best in humanity in seeking to improve—truly improve—a piece of the planet. A bridge also has positive connotations. It is a metaphor, denoting connection and linkage of two places, ideas, persons, groups, and so forth. We speak of building bridges to create harmony and working relationships. The notion of a bridge in conversation and social life is one of necessity, of importance, of enabling us to cross to a place previously thought unreachable, or at best, reachable after considerable effort. As Charles S. Whitney in Bridges of the World wrote in 1929, “[b]ridges typify progress more than any other structures built by man.” Perhaps without realizing, we feel the sense of connectedness we need as human beings when presented with the most obvious physical manifestation of this.
It is not simply their symbolism, but also their beauty, that attracts. Painters have captured bridges since at least the Middle Ages. Bridges form part of landscape backgrounds, and have been deemed worthy enough to be the subject matter of great art. Monet’s Westminster Bridge and Frank Stella’s Brooklyn Bridge are two relatively “modern” examples. El Greco’s View of Toledo features a stone arch bridge in the lower left third of the image, an essential part of that landscape. Van Gogh specifically used a movable (“drawbridge”) bridge the subject of his various paintings of the bridge at Arles. The Fauvist painter André Derain in his 1906 Pool of London depicts an abstraction of London’s Tower Bridge in the background.
Throughout this book, the bridges that are featured and described have been selected in part for their aesthetics. They are presented not merely as documentary representations of type, but also for their uniqueness. Professor David Billington of Princeton University devoted a book to the concept of the bridge as structural art, and others have written on the importance of aesthetics in bridge construction. Can a bridge itself be deemed a work of art? Billington argues yes, even if a different mode of artistic expression, such as “structural art.” Engineers continue to argue for aesthetic considerations as a fundamental part of bridge design. They are, on a certain level, functional sculptures, and their grace and appeal to the senses is at least as important as their ability to challenge and master the forces of nature that otherwise work to destroy them.
To appreciate the bridges of New Jersey, and gain a deeper understanding of the decisional process behind them, it is worth knowing something of bridges in general. We can begin with the definition provided by one of America’s first (and uniquely named) bridge engineers, Squire Whipple in his 1847 essay on bridge building: “A Bridge is a structure for sustaining the weights of carriages and animals in their transit over a stream, gulf or valley.”
It is probable that primitive humans first discovered bridges by chance. Perhaps a river carving its way through an area formed a natural bridge. Or maybe a vine became tangled in two separate trees, or a tree fell across a stream. Whatever occurred, it was observed and learned from.
The American bridge builder and engineer, David Steinman, speculates that nature did in fact provide the inspiration for the three major types of bridges—the corbelled arch, beam and suspension bridge, and that prehistoric man had found and used these.
But one day a superman, who possessed extraordinary intelligence for his day, discovered that he was stranded without any of these bridges of nature to aid him at a time when he needed one badly. In a moment of brilliant thinking, he recalled the shape of such a structure—of, for example, the tree-trunk kind—and therefore he asked himself why he could not make or creates such a span.
Over a century earlier, Thomas Pope, writing his own history of bridges in the early nineteenth century, commented:
That Bridges were requisite in the earliest periods of time, we cannot doubt, from the knowledge we possess of the common operations of nature. Seas, Lakes, Rivers, Brooks, and Swamps, must have existed formerly as well as now; and man, in his common pursuits, must have invented means of surmounting these obstacles to his correspondence with his fellow man, and keeping up the chain of connexion so necessary to his existence, as well as to his gratification.
We know that certain natural bridges were formed, that sustained themselves by the geometric principles of the arch. Such bridges, as those formed in Virginia and Arizona, attest to the strength of the arch. We also may reasonably surmise that the first bridges were such simple structures. There remains evidence of the “clapper” (from the Latin claperius, meaning “pile of stones”) bridges in England, primitive rocks arranged for passage over rivers. These first beam, or stringer, bridges, were formed simply by laying a flat stone or log on supports without need for complex mathematical calculations or resolution of engineering problems.
By the same token, ropes and vines were used for carrying people over ravines and canyons. Perhaps someone first swung from one point to another, and later kept the vine or rope attached to two points so that cargo or persons could slide along from one end to the other. Eventually, these supports would hold another vine or rope over which people would walk, ultimately becoming a “roadway” in itself. Such may have been the origins of the suspension bridge.
The Romans, while certainly not the originators of the arch (credit has been given to the Babylonians for that), can fairly be said to have perfected its application and principles. Some of the stone arch bridges built by Roman engineers survive to this day.
So the allure of the bridge, beyond metaphorical and aesthetic attributes, is also attributable to their inherent link with the past, and their presumed link to the future. A bridge has a name, and that name connects it to other people and places. A bridge has a history, surrounded by ghosts. A bridge is part of the landscape. And bridges become part of our cultural awareness. It is impossible to think of New York without the George Washington Bridge, or San Francisco without the Golden Gate Bridge. The contemporary engineer/author Henry Petroski links them to their cities, calling them their “symbols and souls” in his book Engineers of Dreams.
So bridges attract on a variety of levels. They are functional, as well as a source of pride and aesthetic pleasure. They have inspired poetry, as most vividly expressed by the American poet Hart Crane in his eponymous work The Bridge. Earlier in American literary history, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured the almost confessional nature of standing on a bridge, contemplating the dark water below, alone with one’s thoughts, in his poem, also entitled “The Bridge”:
Yet whenever I cross the river
On its bridge with wooden piers,
Like the odor of brine from the ocean
Comes the thought of other years.
Bridges therefore attract us. In considering New Jersey’s bridges, we need to understand not merely their allure not only in terms of history or engineering, but their stature as art.
The Bridge as Art
In designing the Brooklyn Bridge, John Roebling declared that the bridge “will be beautiful.” Called at the time the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” it was eighth only in terms of chronology, but not significance. Today’s engineering curricula and bridge design publications stress the need for aesthetic considerations. This makes sense politically as well as aesthetically. No one wants to pay taxes for an ugly bridge.
Othmar H. Ammann, an extraordinarily gifted engineer who designed of the George Washington Bridge and Bayonne Steel Arch Bridge featured in this book. He is quoted on the BridgePros, LLC web site as saying:
Economics and utility are not the engineer’s only concerns. He must temper his practicality with aesthetic sensitivity. His structures should please the eye. In fact, an engineer designing a bridge is justified in making a more expensive design for beauty’s sake alone. After all, many people will have to look at the bridge for the rest of their lives. Few of us appreciate eyesore, even if we should save a little money by building them.
Two contemporary writers on Ammann also emphasize the importance of this sentiment. Princeton University Professor David Billington, mentioned previously, notes Ammann’s near-obsession with the Brooklyn Bridge. Its importance to Ammann was his effort to make the George Washington Bridge as much a cultural symbol of his time as Roebling had made the Brooklyn Bridge in his. In fact, Billington criticizes the Hell Gate Bridge, designed by Gustav Lindenthal and on which Ammann worked, as having a disparity between its aesthetic and utilitarian functions. Contending that anyone writing about the Brooklyn Bridge without considering Hart Crane’s poem on that bridge cannot write seriously about the bridge, Billington once stated in an interview that “the very fact that you can’t write about a bridge without invoking a poet says something about both of ’em [sic] that is so deeply cultural that it means that the goal for the future or the image or the vision of the future is just that kind of connection.” Bridges are meant to last, like sculptures, and beyond simply allowing transportation, they are expressions of cultural achievement of their times, or should be.
Bridges, particularly the larger ones, stand out as part of the landscape and paradoxically, and at the same time become prominent and seemingly indispensable features of the same. As an example, consider the view of the Great Beds Lighthouse (built 1880) in the Raritan River with the Outerbridge Crossing in the background, taken from Morgan Breach. This is a unique vista, and the engineering fits nicely into the environment. It complements it. While it may be fashionable to decry any human construction as defacing the land, one must also recognize that humans are as much a part of the environment as any other animal. Why should not their achievements become part of that land, provided they are not destructive? In this regard, consider the image of the Great Beds Lighthouse with the Outerbridge Crossing in the background in the color plate section.