The Bridge as a serenely aspiring expression of the brooding city is caught very early on a summer morning in the year of its completion, 1883, by the young painter William Bliss Baker. He died three years after this scene was painted, at age 27. This lovely but realistic study, full of affection for young fishermen, interest in the incoming bark with a puffing tug alongside, and a kind of holy awe in the awakening city, home of so many dreams and daily agonies, shows the Bridge as an unfinished thought still rising as it leaves the picture-a thought seeming to lead to immense promise in the fature. From a private collection, courtesy The Brooklyn Museum.
The Brooklyn Bridge: Spanning Time & Tide, 1883-1983 by Peter Stanford Detective Alfred Young will be in the Brooklyn Bridge Parade May 24, dressed in bobby's helmet and other police accoutrements of a century ago-the wisecracking, New York Mayor Koch will be there, the Borough Presidents, Reformers and Regulars , and Powers and Principalities assembled. The papers noted the variety of "interests" enrolled in the first march across the Bridge, and such interests live on .. . But it is the people's bridge. It was mine when I was a child, I think, or I perhaps was its. I looked up to it for reassurance, passing by or glimpsing it against the skyline of jumbled Brooklyn Heights rooftops, and found in it some 24
sense of continuity (a word I did not_ know) , and a very strong feeling that there had been giants in the land before my time. I lay on my belly studying engravings of the old ships that had at one time apparently spread fantastically billowing sails beneath its eminence. I walked its boardwalk triumphant over the toy tugs and stabbing masts of steamers, the city like a thing built out of a child's wooden blocks ...only I knew it wasn't. The great thing, the reassuring and challenging thing was that it was all real. That reality is seen differently by different people. When I think of the Bridge I usually think first of its tremendous stone block presence, its rough, time-black-
ened surface (it's since been cleaned) running with the cold winter rain , while I walk down Dover Street in its lee, flanked by buildings that still stand today, through efforts Norma and I and friends had something to do with . (Essentially in those efforts I was saving a dream landscape of my childhood: I don't know what the hell my generous-minded friends were doing!) But whatever it is we see in the Bridge, it is real, it is there. Here is that reality, then , seen and lovingly recorded by people whose brushes speak truer than these words. Perhaps they will start others dreaming of the Bridge, or each of his own Brooklyn Bridge in his own corner of the dream forest that is hi s life! SEA HIS1DRY, SUMMER 1983