He is best known throughout new york for the series of video walking tours presented by channel 13, including the Emmy Award Nominated shows 42nd street, broadway and harlem. He lectured at numerous vienna venues, including columbia, university of pennsylvania and smithsonian and Harvard Graduate School of planning and architecture. We always like to ask everyone to turn off cell phones and electronic beepers. Now lets give barry lewis a warm welcome. Thank you. [applause] professor lewis i dont need that. You know me. Im all over the stage. Actually it is interesting there it i had people talking to me about the lecture. Im not really talking about the the Brooklyn Bridge as much as brooklyn. New york would never admit it needed brooklyn but it needed it. Again, just in case people were not here, its a series of three lectures. I did the first one about a month ago. Remember new york and Staten Island becomes a premier city by the 1820s and 180s. 1830s. 60,000 in manhattan in 1800 and 1875 one million on manhattan island. That is called growth. Here on the upper left is an 1860s print of the built up part of manhattan and new york. Remember in those days new york city was straightly manhattan island. When you went across the river you were in the independent city of brooklyn. By the time you get to the 1860s the bridge will begin in 1869. The reason it was needed by the time you get to the late 1860s downtown new york is the Central Business district of new york. It becomes the Central District of america by the 1830s during by 1900s it is the c. B. D. Of the world. That means new york is growing. But unfortunately mantoman is manhattan is a long skinny island and the only way to grow is uptown and by the time you get to the 1860s, the time the bridge will be built the middle class people are forced to live as far as west northeast 40s and 50s and 60s east of central park. They have to commute to wall street. Women commute to the Union Madison square area and all that commute is done with horse cars. It is fun in disney world, but if you have been to depend on these things they were horrible. This is an idea of the traffic. That is Madison Square on the right side and fifth avenue going uptown. Broadway is off to the left. Look at that backup of horse cars. If youre headed to wall street, that is another three miles. You think commutation today is awful. It was pretty awful back then. When you got downtown on the left is a cartoon of what was the busiest intersection in america and one of the busiest in the world. That is broadway and fulton st. The portico is Saint Pauls Church which is still there. There is the u. S. Post office which my goodness is not there today. The preservationists saw over that but that stood until 1938 and that is broadway going towards tribeca. That is park road toward the Brooklyn Bridge. You notice chicago on the right. He was no better. That was the middle of the loop in the 1890s. Nobody is going anywhere fast. The problem was the street systems of our cities could not take all the people. Everybody is piled on to the street and you had to get people off the street. One way or another. Ok. Remember i mentioned last week what we call Brooklyn Today is basically kings county. Originally that was six separate towns. They were founded by the dump dutch and recognized by the english. Brooklyn was one of them. It was the closest to new york and new york was the economic engine of america beginning in the 1830s. That Economic Activity spills over into brooklyn. Sure, if you wanted to live in manhattan, you can live uptown and the ease 40s, 50s and 60s. If you could live in brooklyn, you were across from the Central Business district. This is important to remember because we think of wall street as the financial district but it is c. B. D. And all you had to do was cross that river and you would have a wonderful neighborhood to live in. If you know brooklyn, you can realize if you think about there but across from the c. B. D. , the Central Business district were fine middle class row house neighborhoods of the 19th begins with Brooklyn Heights and most expensive to live in. As you fan out from Brooklyn Heights you have harold gardens, cobble phil, park slope, the top of Prospect Heights and these were fine middle class neighborhoods to serve the people who worked in the c. B. D. Around wall street. In the 1850s, brooklyn annexed the independent city of williamsburg and rest of old town of bushwick. What was that area across from . It wound up being the cross from manhattan from the Lower East Side, which was becoming the main immigrant district of the city. The immigrants Lower East Side is the densest urban district in the world and you have these immigrants in new york and they are packed together in tenements. They are looking across the river and saying why arent we on the other side . That included my grandparents who came in 1910 and wound up in williamsburg which is where my father was born. To the immigrants, they basically came to williamsburg. It is interesting. When brooklyn annexed williamsburg and bushwick they called it the eastern addition. I never understood why. As a kid i thought it was on the north side of brooklyn but they , called it the eastern addition and that eastern addition, because of its proximity to the Lower East Side the immigrant section of new york, that eastern addition got the spillover from the other Lower East Side from williamsburg and green point. Here is a map of the neighborhoods of brooklyn. From williamsburg and green point they spilled into bushwick , which is exactly whats going on now with the young people. And they spilled sorry. They spilled over into williamsburg and green point and bushwick, east new york, Cypress Hills an over the board into queens where i grew up in woodhaven. When i grew up in woodhaven we called the brooklyn line the city line and it is still called that today. There is a whole discount area on the city line. This area the eastern addition was the tenement packed immigrant area which became the city of brooklyn. But across from new york across , from the c. B. D. You had such fine neighborhoods from fort green, to the Prospect Heights. Middle class housing for the middle class people headed to wall street to their corporate jobs. Jessica over what i went over in the first lecture, remember the ferry to fulton street and fulton streetbrooklyn starts in the 17th century but 1814 it goes high tech. A steam driven fairy. Now you know you are going to get to brooklyn and that is when brooklyn takes off and where the ferry landed. This is the road to jamaica. We called it fulton street today. Brooklyn heights is to the left on a ridge. The moment you come off the piers you go up to a height. That is brooklyn height. To the right, no the north it is a pretty flat land. Recall that down under the Manhattan Bridge overpass, dumbo. It is an Industrial Area that is fast gentrifying. Where you see brookland ferry is where Brooklyn Bridge park is. The first ferry was to fulton street. Then by the time to the 1830s. 1840s, he, this is facing the ease river. South is to the right and ferry to fulton street is to the left. There it is. In the 1830s this is at the east river and starts another ferry. In the 1850s the pierponts finally decide to develop their property and put in a ferry from montague street over to wall street. So you have three ferries within a few blocks of each other and there was no place to put another ferry. And by the time you get to the 1860s they are overrun with people. There was really no place to put another one. Here is a 19th century photograph of the montague street dock. This again is the pierpont property. If that is the ferry, im not sure. It took you from her to wall here to wall street. There is montague on the down slope to bring down from the heights of Brooklyn Heights to the waterfront and here is another view looking at montague street. It looks so quiet and people. You think how lovely 8 30 on the weekday morning 10 minutes on , the river , birds are chirping and the waves are lapping. Give it another thought because that is what 8 30 on a weekday morning was like. Nikki reed was awful. The commute was awful. The cartoons tell you the truth and you notice it seems like noahs ark. That is how you had to deal with it. It is what you had to deal with every morning at 8 30. It is like noahs ark or the last train out of russia before the war begins. We have it a hard but i think they had it harder. And sometimes even the east river would freeze. As if Everything Else was going wrong, you get out of work at 5 30. You are tired, want to go home and you walk across ease river. You hope the ice doesnt break and you fall in. Who knows how thick the river is . You notice a brooklyn ferry frozen until the thaw comes. It was 1867 when this freeze took place. Visiting the city at the time and seeing the freeze, seeing people impeded from going across the east river except by foot and he knew that he had a better way of doing it. Visiting new york was this fellow, John Roebling. You never invited him to dinner to tell jokes. But he was a brilliant man, german by birth and education. He was an engineer trained at the best schools because it was germany. His philosophy teacher was hagel. He said where do you think the future is and hagel said the new world. Forget europe, it is the old world. It is finished. Go to the new world. He did and wound up in northeastern pennsylvania and there he created a machine that created wire rope. Actually little thin strands of wire out of steel and you bundle them and you got wire rope. With wire rope and then the bundles were bundled together i wire cable steel cable. , a with the steel cables you could suspend roadways but also aqueducts for canals that needed to cross the landscape. Absolutely brilliant. When he was in new york and saw the east river freeze he knew that the suspension Bridge Technology that he used for the canal aqueducts he could adapt it to the Brooklyn Bridge. Except the Brooklyn Bridge would be far longer than anything ever built, and im talking about the central span him which is what it has to hold up the here is a print of what the future bridge would look like. They called it the bridge to long island and others called it the new york Brooklyn Bridge and some east and eventually got the name Brooklyn Bridge. On the upper left you see the Delaware Aqueduct that he designed to bring the delaware and hudson canal over the delaware river. That is a river underneath it. The canal is over it and the suspension Bridge Technology allow the largest clearance the , widest clearance for boats on the delaware river. That was the reason Suspension Technology was used. Today it is a roadway. I was there many years ago and it may be only a pedestrian bridge, i dont know. But the technology it is a beautiful structure north of port jervis and north of interstate 84 and connects pennsylvania with new york right above port jervis. That bridge is only 500 plus feet long. The Brooklyn Bridge will be a mile long but the central span will be 1,600 feet. That central span is very important. That is why the Suspension Technology was used. It gave you the widest span. The east river was a very busy commercial river and it couldnt be blocked by a pier to hold up the bridge. With Suspension Technology you had 1,600 feet of space for ships to pass. Very, very important. By the way his wire was used in , the bridge. At some point it wasnt but that was the scandal. If you want to know about the building of the bridge, you read David Mcculloughs book. It was written in the 1980s. At the time the bridge was 100 years old. That roeblng wire is going to be in operation independently until the 1950s. It will be used in the George Washington bridge opened in 1931. By the way, the g. W. Bridge has a central span that is twice the length of the Brooklyn Bridge but g. W. Is a shorter bridge because it goes from cliff to cliff. From the palisades cliffs in jersey to those in new york morningside heights. The Brooklyn Bridge is going from the flatlands to fulton street. That is flat and has to be a longer bridge. You notice it comes down to clark road and this is the City Hall Park. It is taking you you from the center of the Central Business district of new york to the heart of the Business District of the city of brooklyn. That is why it was placed where it was placed. Now in surveying for the bridge ,in 1869, roebling and his son are on the dock surveying and a brooklyn ferry came in and the operator missed where he was supposed to dock the ferry and it rammed into john and crushed his leg and in 10 days he died of lock jaw, very horrible dealt. In 1869, before it is begun he is out of the picture. The fellow who really built the bridge is this guy. Washington roebling. He knew if the name remained in history it would always be associated with John Roebling. He knew that nobody really noticed he was around. He was the guy who actually built the bridge, but in the 1900s and he was interviewed and said to a reporter most people think i died in 1869. That is when his father was killed in the accident. But he did an amazing job of building the bridge. Within a year of its construction he takes it over from his father. He comes down with the benz, the construction caissons which become the towers was done under very High Pressure air. If you go in High Pressure two surface pressure air it is quite a difference and causes a problem if you go too fast nitrogen bubbles in the blood. For some it was fatal. 28 men died from the work on the bridge. It was a dangerous job. Some from accidents and some from the benz. That means this fellow in 1870 to 1883 he is basically a semi invalid and oversees it from a house that no longer exists. It was demolished to make way for the brooklynqueens expressway in the 1950s. He was invalid for all that time. Through binoculars or maybe or on a badescope day he would take of the violin, but he would do all of the drawings as he saw the bridge progressing but they had to be taken to the bridge and he could do that. Whoever took it to the engineers will to know what the drawings were about. Who did he choose to do that . His wife emily roebling. What a fascinating lady she was. She basically learned basic engineering from her husband so that she could take the drawings to the engineers on the bridge. They, being all men, were not too happy taking orders from a woman. But she was so confident and knew so well what she was doing , she was so efficient. She had the right manner about her that they can to respect her so much that when the Brooklyn Bridge to open in 1883 she got the honor of driving the first carriage over the Brooklyn Bridge. After it was built she went back to being a housewife. She was happy to do that. She died in the early 1900s of cancer. Her husband who was invalid during the time got better after it opened and i could imagine why he was invalid. Bridges kept on collapsing back then. He was a roebling. Im sure he felt his bridge would never collapse. Yet, you never know. So in the back of his mind he could have seen the scenario it is built, it opens and it falls into the river. No wonder he was nervous. After it was built his nerves settled down and he got over most of the medical problems he had and outlived his wife about 25 years and ran the wire company until the early 1900s. It worked out of trenton. The factory might still be there. There is a roebling, new jersey. There is a Roebling Museum and it is dedicated to the wire company and Brooklyn Bridge. He basically winds up running the company even in his 70s. He didnt like the way his grandson was running it and came out of retirement and ran it. He lives until the 1920s. The last major person involved with the construction. Sick as he was in the almost died, he is the last of them to survive. There was another character involved, William Marcy tweed. Boss tweed. He was representative of the corrupt politics of the day. There is a story of how he tried to noodle his way into the funding of the bridge. He was at the height of his power at the beginning of the construction, but fell from power in the 1870s. Today we have a new view of William Marcy tweed. A lot of people say the reformers who hated him wanted the immigrants to be nice White Angelo Saxon yankees. He didnt care what language they spoke or where they were from. He understood they needed coal to heat their apartments and needed a job to put food on the table and he got both of them for the immigrants