Brooklyn Bridge In the Dark

I can’t resist posting this photo of the Brooklyn Bridge with the power out, against a dark New York sky:
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If you haven’t read it, David McCullough’s The Great Bridge, about the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, is a truly wonderful book. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. It includes one of my favorite stories: how bridge-builder Jonathan Roebling, founder of the Roebling Wire Co. and the father of the principal builder of the Brooklyn Bridge, Civil War hero Washington Roebling, got the first wire strand across the Niagara River when he built a suspension bridge just above (if memory serves) Niagara Falls, where the fast-running current didn’t permit the usual method of sending the wire over by boat.
Also, while none of the Power Line crew are precisely feminists by modern definition, we have among us eight daughters. So we appreciate the book’s feminist angle, centered on Washington Roebling’s wife Emily, daughter of Union general Gouvernour K. Warren, Washington’s Civil War commander, who played a heroic and indispensable role in the construction of the bridge after her husband was disabled by…well, just read the book. Please. These people deserve to be remembered.

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