By Katherine Hobson
Hart Crane wrote poetry about it. Joseph Stella painted it. Woody Allen romanced Diane Keaton in front of it. Dave Frieder? The New York photographer has actually climbed the Brooklyn Bridge, lugging 80 pounds of camera equipment up the massive steel cables to one of the Gothic towers high above the East River. From that perch, he could see past the opposite tower, over the cityscape, and into New Jersey. "It's such an incredible contrast," he says of the view. "Here's a bridge built in the late 1800s standing above all of downtown Manhattan."

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Somehow, the Brooklyn Bridge looks equally at home in Frieder's late-20th-century photos and the earliest sepia prints taken 120 years ago, when it connected two separate cities then expanding only horizontally. It's still one of the most visible symbols in a town that doesn't lack for them. Behind the symbol is a story of genius, illness, family conflict, and a woman who was ahead of her time.

Brooklyn is now New York City's largest borough, but 150 years ago, although growing quickly, it was considered a cowtown by its neighbors across the river. Although Brooklyn and New York are separated by no more than a mile in places, the journey by ferry could take more than an hour in the winter, when the East River froze over and slowed the boats. In 1852, one of those chilled and grumpy commuters was actually in the position to do something about it. John Augustus Roebling, a German immigrant and engineer, was a technical genius--he had introduced iron wire rope to the United States and was using it in his current project, a suspension bridge over the Niagara gorge. He was also obsessed by weird diets, seances, and mystical philosophy and was not an easygoing man. "His domestic life can be summed up in a few words, domineering tyranny," wrote his son, Washington, in a candid biography, Life of John A. Roebling. Washington continued: "It was a fortunate thing that his engineering engagements kept him away for prolonged periods, otherwise his children would all have died young."

Were Freud and his theories not decades in the future, the psychoanalyst would certainly have had choice words about the Roeblings and their roles in the bridge project. John Roebling was chosen as engineer for the bridge in 1867, when the state legislature created a private company to build it. And despite his feelings toward his domineering father, Washington, also a civil engineer, ended up becoming a key figure in the construction of the bridge. Father and son were surveying the Brooklyn tower site in 1869 when a ferry crashed into the pilings and crushed John's toes. Deeply skeptical of medical doctors, he accepted amputation (without anesthetic) but refused any further treatment beyond a series of water cures. He developed tetanus, and as his jaw locked and made speech impossible, he wrote notes about the bridge and his financial affairs. He died of the disease less than a month later.

It fell to Washington, wracked by guilt over his failure to warn his father of the ferry's approach, to carry out the ambitious vision. The structure would be the longest suspension bridge in the world, with a span of more than 1,595 feet between the towers. Heresy of heresies, it would use cables woven of steel, stronger than the usual iron but rare in bridges. And its towers would require underwater foundations, built using open-bottomed, airtight wood-and-iron boxes called caissons that rested on the river bottom--44 feet below the water's surface for the Brooklyn tower, and 78 feet for the Manhattan side. Workers were literally sealed inside, where they would dig deeply into the riverbed to sink the foundation.

Working in the caissons was like working in a coffin, and not only because of the cramped and stuffy conditions. In 1870, a fire broke out in one, forcing Washington to flood the caisson to put it out. And because of the high air pressure in the underwater work site, ascending too quickly to the surface caused a poorly understood illness, then called caisson disease and now known as the bends. In the spring of 1872, caisson disease--characterized by joint pain, skin rashes, and even paralysis-- struck the chief engineer himself.

Labor of love. Washington nearly died, and although he attempted to return to the work site, soon he was simply physically unable to supervise the project. After a recuperative trip to Germany, he and his family moved to Trenton, N.J.

How would the chief engineer communicate with his crew? Enter Emily Roebling, Washington's wife. He had fallen in love with her when he was in the Union Army during the Civil War--she was the sister of his commanding officer--and remained completely smitten with her. Emily, says scholar Vivian Thiele, was athletic, smart, and an utter clotheshorse. When her husband fell ill, she wrote letters and read correspondence from the assistant engineers. After the family moved back to Brooklyn, in 1876, she became his on-site representative. Eventually she administered her husband's financial affairs and helped support him during at least two failed attempts to remove him as chief engineer.

Some historians have elevated her to the level of engineer, but Thiele is wary of that description. Rather than engineering, "she was very good at public relations," always ready to defend her husband's reputation, says Thiele, who oversees the collection of Roebling letters and materials at the Archibald S. Alexander Library at Rutgers University.

There was plenty to tax Emily's PR skills. The project was constantly beset by accusations of bribery, political machinations, and plain old doubt. "Every possible accusation was made," wrote Washington. "The bridge would fall down, the wind would blow it down, it would never pay, nobody would ever use it, it damaged the shipping interests, it was too long to walk over it, it would never compete with the ferries, the cost would be so great that the cities would be ruined, etc."

In May 1883, a week before the bridge's official opening, Emily asked to cross it in a horse-drawn carriage to demonstrate its safety. She chose an unusual symbol of victory as a traveling partner: a live rooster. On the day itself, the chief engineer watched the festivities from his window in Brooklyn before he and Emily hosted a reception attended by President Chester Arthur.

Nothing was really ever the same after the 13-year project was finished. Not for Washington; his firm went on to make wire rope for bridges including the George Washington and Golden Gate, and he even led the business again for five years toward the end of his life. (He did this all without Emily, who died in 1903.) Not for Brooklyn, which grew to be the country's third-largest city before becoming a borough in 1898. Not for New York City; in his book The Great Bridge, historian David McCullough wrote that the bridge can be seen as the gateway to the city's modern era--introducing the steel later used to build the skyscrapers that dwarfed even the bridge's mammoth towers.

When "the wise man" crosses the Brooklyn Bridge, Harper's New Monthly magazine wrote in 1883, "he will linger to get the good of the splendid sweep of view about him, which his esthetic self will admit pays wonderful interest on his investment of nothing." Frieder, the photographer, can no longer linger at the top of the bridge for the most splendid view of all; post-September 11 security concerns have put a temporary halt to his climbs. He hopes authorities ease their restrictions soon. "I'm heartbroken," he says. "I'm dying to get back up there."