Brooklyn Bridge Walk: NYC Skyline Views

The Brooklyn Bridge took fourteen years to build and outlived two of the three people most responsible for it. John Augustus Roebling designed the bridge but never saw it built — a ferry crushed his foot while he was surveying the site in 1869, and he died of tetanus three weeks later. His son, Washington Roebling, took over as chief engineer and was himself disabled by decompression sickness from working in the underwater caissons, leaving him largely confined to his home for the rest of construction.

From that home, his wife Emily Warren Roebling effectively ran the project for the next decade — learning engineering, overseeing the work crews, and speaking for her husband to city officials who had never dealt with a woman in that role. When the bridge finally opened on 24 May 1883, Emily Warren Roebling was given the honor of the first crossing, riding across in a carriage with a rooster on her lap as a symbol of victory.

This walk starts on the Manhattan side, near the Lower East Side, and follows the same wooden pedestrian promenade that has run above the traffic lanes since the bridge opened. At 1,595.5 feet, the main span was the longest of any suspension bridge in the world when it was completed, and the bridge was the first to use steel — rather than iron — for its cables, a choice that helped it outlast nearly every other structure built in New York that century.

Midway across, the views open up in both directions: Brooklyn Heights and its brownstone rooftops ahead, the Lower Manhattan skyline receding behind. The bridge's two Gothic Revival stone towers, with their pointed arches, were themselves the tallest structures in the Western Hemisphere when they went up, briefly outranking every building in the city they connect.

This is what TravelHubCam is here to show you: not just a crossing, but the bridge a family built between them — a father's design, a son's unfinished labor, and the wife who carried it the rest of the way.