October, 1905
By Eugene Shade Bisbee
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xpert engineers predict a catastrophe more fearful than anything that has ever happened in this country unless the conditions now obtaining and daily growing worse in the operation of the Brooklyn bridge are corrected. Erected twenty-two years ago, before there was a cable line in the city of New York and before the trolley system of electric propulsion had been perfected, the great structure, more than a mile long, was intended for the conditions then prevalent. Cars were not expected to be run across it, except the cable lines which began operation with the opening of the bridge. The weight then borne
was not very great.Conditions have changed and there is imminent danger that the growing strain may prove too much for even those eighteen-inch strands of steel, and that some day from five to fifteen thousand persons will be precipitated, amid a mass of tangled wreckage, to the East River, 135 feet below. The absolute loss of every life on the bridge at the time will be certain, and the destruction, property will total many millions of dollars. No one knows what chemical changes have taken place within those eighteen-inch steel cables during the past twenty-two years. They were never subjected to any tests for conditions surrounding electricity as a motive power, and electricians are at sea as to what may have occurred to weaken them. 
The bridge is at present being operated to the limit of its capacity. Trolley cars are supposed to maintain a distance of 150 feet between them at all times, yet they seldom are so far apart and whenever blockades occur there are continuous strings of them and of the cable and elevated trains from one end to the other. These are, of course, jammed with people, while other thousands walk across the promenade. At such times 15,000 persons are risking their lives on the structure and it is, in time, sure to give way under the tremendous overload. Every hour during the rushes of morning and night three hundred surface cars cross the bridge. Added to these are more than five hundred elevated cars and many thousands of pedestrians.THE HUMAN STREAM THAT CROSSES BROOKLYN BRIDGE.  Better terminal facilities would alter these conditions and relieve the bridge of such great strain. These terminals are contemplated, yet red tape and dilatoriness of public officials are responsible for conditions which, in the opinion of expert engineers, are sure to result in fearful disaster if they are not "soon taken in hand". Among the officials of the lines operating across the structure and who have expressed the opinion that the bridge was in danger of breaking under the great weight imposed upon it, John F. Calderwood, general manager of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, is very outspoken in his views. He says that his company has before it on the Brooklyn bridge the greatest transportation problem in the world and that it is powerless to better the conditions until the officials of New York and Brooklyn enlarge the terminals at both ends. Even with the large number of surface cars and elevated and cable trains that are now in operation it is impossible to carry all the people who wish to cross and thousands are forced to walk. The crowd shown in one of the illustrations was photographed during the noon hour, when the traffic is comparatively limited, while that at the New York terminal was taken in the forenoon after the business crowd had crossed to their destinations in Manhattan. |
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