In celebration of the grand opening of possibly the world’s most eagerly awaited bridge, the magazine Harper’s Weekly devoted to it a long article that stated in its opening paragraph the reason for such anticipation. “There were days [in the winter in 1866 – 67] when passengers from New York to Albany arrived earlier than those who set out the same morning from their breakfast tables in Brooklyn for their desks in New York.” That helps to explain why 250,000 turned out on the first day of its opening to be among the first to walk across the path between the island of Manhattan and Brooklyn.

On this day, May 24, in 1883, after a fourteen-year construction the Brooklyn Bridge opened in a grand ceremony presided over by President Chester A. Arthur and New York governor Grover Cleveland.

Divers working to place the underwater caissons on which the bridge pillars would rest did not yet know about decompression sickness and need for slow ascents to the surface, causing many of them to fall ill. Construction was further slowed down by a fire and several collapses. But when it was built, its chief engineer John Robeling could rightly claim he had done what no one else could, creating the first steel suspension bridge.