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Photography Culture

Old Photographs of NYC’s Bridges When They Were Being Built Resurface

Michelle Rae Uy
No Comments
01/23/2014
2 Mins read

Last Updated on 01/23/2014 by Chris Gampat

original

Photo by Ross Wolfe from Brooklyn Visual Heritage

Bridges are designed and built to provide an easy passage over a physical obstacle, i.e. a body of water, and connect lands. As such, they are probably one of mankind’s greatest innovations. Without them, many would probably still be suffering slow-moving boats to get from one place to another.

They are also a source of inexplicable fascination for many, must-see structures for tourists to visit, behold, and photograph; their individual designs, originally intended by engineers to serve their individual purpose, turning them into beautiful works of art that attract people like moths to a flame.

Cases in point are New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan Bridge. Each day, hundreds of people, tourists and residents alike, visit them in wonderment, walk over them, and even leave attach love-locks to them, taking familiar photographs of them like they would Paris’ Eiffel Tower or Yosemite’s landscape.

In those throngs of visitors, however, only a small number know that these two bridges, along with the Williamsburg Bridge, the Queensboro Bridge, and the Hell Gate Bridge, were born out of the city’s golden age of bridge building, circa 1870s to 1920s. This month, as the construction of the replacement Tappan Zee Bridge is underway, a collection images from that golden age emerge, as if to remind us that it took a lot of blood, sweat, and tears to build these structures we idealize so much.

See the photos after the jump.

Via Gizmodo

Brooklyn Bridge (1870)

ku-xlarge43Illustrations by Marcel Douwe Dekker

original1Photo by Ross Wolfe from Brooklyn Visual Heritage

5Opening of the Brooklyn Bridge May 24, 1883 from Racontrs

The Manhattan Bridge (1901)

m1

m2Photo by Eugene de Salignac from the NYC Municipal Archivesm3m9Via LOC

m4From Recuerdos de Pandora

The Williamsburg Bridge (1896)

8From pds209

7 6From LOC

10Opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in February 1907 from Harper’s Magazine

The Queensboro Bridge (1901)

m5 m6Photos by Eugene de Salignac from the NYC Municipal Archives 

The Hell Gate Bridge (1912)

hg1 hg2From LOC

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