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)
Illustrations by Marcel Douwe Dekker
Photo by Ross Wolfe from Brooklyn Visual Heritage
Opening of the Brooklyn Bridge May 24, 1883 from Racontrs
The Manhattan Bridge (1901)
Photo by Eugene de Salignac from the NYC Municipal Archives
Via LOC
From Recuerdos de Pandora
The Williamsburg Bridge (1896)
From pds209
From LOC
Opening of the Williamsburg Bridge in February 1907 from Harper’s Magazine
The Queensboro Bridge (1901)
Photos by Eugene de Salignac from the NYC Municipal Archives
The Hell Gate Bridge (1912)
From LOC
Please Support The Phoblographer
We love to bring you guys the latest and greatest news and gear related stuff. However, we can’t keep doing that unless we have your continued support. If you would like to purchase any of the items mentioned, please do so by clicking our links first and then purchasing the items as we then get a small portion of the sale to help run the website.
Also, please follow us on Facebook, Google+, Flickr and Twitter.
