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…