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Technology and Culture 47.4 (2006) 847-848


Reviewed by
Jameson W. Doig
The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History. By Richard Haw. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Pp. xi+307. $26.95.

Richard Haw has set out to provide a wide-ranging history of the myriad ways in which the Brooklyn Bridge has been understood and interpreted by writers, poets, painters, and photographers since the span was proposed and construction begun in the 1860s, and extending to the bridge's valued use as an escape route from the 9/11 disaster and the blackout of 2003. In contrast to other major works on this "icon" of American history—for example, David McCullough's The Great Bridge, which mainly focuses on the origin and construction of the structure—Haws explores important cultural aspects of the bridge and enriches the cultural analysis provided in Alan Trachtenberg's path-breaking Brooklyn Bridge: Fact and Symbol. Haw mines a number of rich veins, some of which are described below.

The strength of the volume lies in the variety of Haw's sources and themes; the book is illustrated with paintings and poems inspired by the span, and the author locates and analyzes the extensive prose applause and criticism that have been directed at the bridge through more than 140 years. Despite a reasonable structure and a solid writing style, however, the book lacks coherence and narrative force. All in all, this is a worthwhile book for anyone interested in the links between important technological achievements and the ways these results are understood by creative artists and citizens, but it is perhaps better digested at several sittings.

The theme of chapter 1 (and much of the book) is captured by the title: "Manufacturing Consensus, Practicing Exclusion." The opening ceremonies in 1883 and the surrounding publicity viewed the bridge as (to quote one of the first-day orators) "a durable monument to Democracy [End Page 847] itself" (p. 20). However, with the prospect of a large crowd of antagonistic unionists taking control of events, vigorous and successful efforts were made to limit the parade and active involvement in the ceremonies to "the loftiest levels of government and their military wing" (p. 24). The local and national press at the event and in the weeks that followed emphasized the nobility of the span and its importance as a symbol of American unity and of the prospect for further technological and social advance. Only the occasional subversive note appeared: on the cover of one weekly paper in 1883, three men are shown under the Brooklyn Bridge, hoisting a body in a sack over the railing and into the water. Haw has reproduced this cover, as well as dozens of favorable and dreadful images.

The power of the bridge, noble and baleful, as seen by visitors from abroad is explored in chapter 2. In 1905, H. G. Wells visited New York and was overawed by its tall buildings and most notably by "the inanimate necessity" of the great span (p. 56). Sixty years later, art historian Kenneth Clark concluded that "all modern New York, heroic New York, started with Brooklyn Bridge" (p. 61). In contrast, poet Federico Garcia Lorca saw the bridge as little more than a platform from which to observe the agonies of working in New York, a driven and sleep-deprived society. And painter Frank Stella, fascinated with the bridge and the city, in his final oil interpretation treats the span as a distorted structure—not a route to a thriving society, but a wall, a barrier that reinforces the immigrant's outsider status.

The final three chapters underscore the ambivalence that attends the span. Chapter 3 devotes sustained attention to the work of photographers: Alfred Stieglitz, Childe Hassam, and Walker Evans, among others. Their photos stressed "size, strength, and monumentality," Haw observes, "over social, economic, and political context" (p. 110). Such images "tell a specific story," he concludes; "the key to civilization fashioned in New York can be found in the monumentality of its skyline, not in...

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