STILL BRIDGE CRAZY AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

Happy 125th birthday to the Brooklyn Bridge. Yesterday, to join the birthday celebrations (and because I am fat and cheap) I walked across the bridge. It's still a spectacular thing—up-close and from either approach—but it's impossible to imagine what it must have looked like to those on the ground as it was rising up out of the river to become the highest point in the city skyline other than the needlelike spire of Trinity Church downtown, linking the two cities for the first time. Read David McCullough's biography of the bridge and its builders, The Great Bridge. If a book about a bridge can be moving and thrilling this one is. The Roeblings' stone and steel wonder was opened to the public on May 24 1883 to general citywide joy and pandemonium. Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland were there. Brooklyn's mayor Seth Low proclaimed "Not one shall see it and not feel prouder to be a man." One hundred and fifty thousand people walked across the day it opened; 163,500 a few days later. The Sun quoted a policeman: "It seems to me as if the people have got the bridge craze." One other thing: Everyone who crossed in those first days paid a toll of one penny. I paid nothing. Adjusting for inflation that means I saved one billion dollars.