a portion of the city's worst slums. The church has since divested itself of
its tenement holdings.

Brooklyn Bridge

Park Row east of City Hall Park, Manhattan, across East River to Sands and Wash-
ington Sts., Brooklyn. IRT Lexington Ave. subway to Brooklyn Bridge; or BMT
subway (local) to City Hall; or 2d or 3d Ave. el to City Hall; or Broadway or
4th Ave. bus to City Hall Park.

Brooklyn Bridge, soaring over the East River, is the subject of more
paintings, etchings, photographs, writings, and conversations than any
other suspension bridge in the world. Uniting the maze of the nineteenth-
century brick and frame residences, factories, and warehouses of the Brook-
lyn shore and the modern skyscraper district of lower Manhattan, the
majestic highway has supplied an extravagant theme to romantic and sym-
bolic fancies. Native artists, including the noted water-colorist John Marin
and the abstractionist Joseph Stella, have played many variations upon its
graceful catenaries, suspenders, and granite towers; while the poet Hart
Crane conceived it in his The Bridge as the dynamic emblem of America's
westward march.

During more than half a century of continuous use, the bridge has
retained its place as the most picturesque of the sixty-one spans that bind
Greater New York into a world metropolis. It was designed in 1867 by
John A. Roebling, who had built the bridge at Niagara Falls and the
more remarkable one over the Ohio River at Cincinnati. While engaged
in drawing the plans for Brooklyn Bridge, Roebling sustained an injury
which resulted in his death from tetanus a year before construction began.
His son, Washington A. Roebling, became construction engineer, but he
too was injured. From a window of a Brooklyn Heights residence he super-
vised the construction of the bridge, watching its progress through a
telescope.

The bridge was opened to traffic on May 24, 1883, pedestrians being
charged a toll of one cent. Six days later a tragedy occurred on the crowded
walk. A woman fell down the wooden steps at the Manhattan approach
to the promenade, and her screams resulted in a panic in which twelve
persons lost their lives and scores were injured.

Unlike the steel towers of the East River bridges that followed, the
buttressed towers of this bridge, rising 272 feet above mean high water,
are constructed entirely of granite. Expressing the increasing load, they