Overview

"""Building the Brooklyn Bridge is a perfect feast, a would-be time-traveler's delight, overflowing with rare and evocative and fascinating images."" -Kurt Andersen Recipient of the 2021 Book Award from The Victorian Society New York. The captivating story of how a bridge of unprecedented size and technology was built during an age of remarkable innovation. This book invites the reader to step back in time to discover why this iconic bridge--proclaimed the 'eighth wonder of the world' soon after its completion and a National Historic Landmark since 1964--continues to hold such a special place in the hearts of so many. Spanning the East River, the Brooklyn Bridge connected for the first time the then independent cities of Brooklyn and New York. This awe-inspiring structure was not only a modern engineering feat of extraordinary imagination, fortitude, and skill, it also was a towering beacon of human triumph. Author Jeffrey Richman, historian at Brooklyn's famed Green-Wood Cemetery, has gathered more than 250 superb nineteenth-century images, many never before published on the printed page, including engineering drawings, photographs, stereographs, woodcuts, and colored lithographs. Flipping through the book, one can imagine the excitement people around the world felt as they followed the progress of the bridge's construction, either through the illustrated papers of the day or using viewers to look at stereographs in three dimensions. Richman specially commissioned more than forty anaglyphs--3D images generated from the historic stereographs--to recreate the 3D experience on the page. Every copy of the book includes a pair of 3D glasses kept in a pocket inside the back cover, offering the reader the sensation of being at the construction site as the towers began to rise. A born storyteller, Richman relates how a small group of dedicated engineers and thousands of workers toiled for more than a decade to construct what was then the largest suspension bridge ever built, section by section, from the massive anchorages and elegant towers to the cables and bridge railway (operational four months after the bridge's official opening). He reminds us how profoundly modern and groundbreaking the bridge was, in its use of steel (a new material) and pioneering construction methods. The bridge still elicits awe and admiration today. ""This is one of humankind's great creations""-author interview with Michelle Miller on CBS Saturday Morning. Click here to watch 7-minute segment on book and bridge."

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9781735600123

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If you love Brooklyn or bridges or New York City or cities or 19th-century marvels--or all of the above, as I do--Building the Brooklyn Bridge is a perfect feast, a would-be time-traveler's delight, overflowing with rare and evocative and fascinating images. It's a terrific book.--Kurt Andersen, author of Evil Geniuses, Fantasyland, Heyday Jeff Richman is a born storyteller. He has pulled together a stunning book full of magical images and beautifully told episodes that help us better understand just how remarkable this engineering feat truly was. This is a joyful book--a celebration of one of America's iconic architectural achievements. This book makes its debut at a moment when we could use some uplift! The book will be pure pleasure for the novice becoming acquainted with New York City history, even as it adds new information to the historical record.--Deborah Schwartz, president of the former Brooklyn Historical Society, 2006-2020 Richman provides researchers and devotees of 'the great bridge' a richly detailed pictorial record with compelling new perspectives on the construction details of this 19th-century engineering feat. A unique feature of this book are the 3D images made from nineteenth-century stereographs. Using the 3D glasses that come with the book, the reader will feel present at the moment the image was captured. This work is a significant contribution to the scholarship on the Brooklyn Bridge and serves as an essential compendium to McCullough's The Great Bridge book.--Anthony M. Cucchiara, Professor Emeritus, Head of Archives and Distinctive Collections, Brooklyn College, 1987-2012; Visiting Professor of Archival Studies, Pratt Institute, 1996-2021 The bridge, with its majestic and inspiring presence, is Brooklyn's gift to the world. Building the Brooklyn Bridge will fire your passion for this icon to new heights and reaffirm the potential in all of us.--Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president, 2002-2013

After 40 years of being a fan, historian Jeffrey Richman's labor of love is done: a beautifully illustrated new book about the 14-year construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.--Larry Shane, A new look at a venerable span: Historian takes deep, detailed dive into construction of the Brooklyn Bridge New York Daily News, (October 16, 2021) An inside view of the 14-year construction process that has been largely out of sight, until now.-- Boomers Daily, (November 27, 2021) If you love Brooklyn or bridges or New York City or cities or 19th-century marvels--or all of the above, as I do--this is a perfect feast, a would-be time-traveler's delight, overflowing with rare and evocative and fascinating images. It's a terrific book.--Kurt Andersen, Peabody Award-winning journalist and author of Evil Geniuses, Fantasyland, Heyday Jeff Richman has pulled together a stunning book full of magical images and beautifully told episodes that help us better understand just how remarkable this engineering feat truly was. This is a joyful book--a celebration of one of America's iconic architectural achievements.--Deborah Schwartz, president of the former Brooklyn Historical Society, 2006-2020 Now, interested Brooklynites can take a walk through history with Richman's extraordinary photographs, showing yesteryears' construction miracles that conjure the irresistible reverence for New York's past.--Aidan Graham Susan De Vries, Rare images of Brooklyn Bridge construction Brooklyn Paper, (August 24, 2021) Richman provides researchers and devotees of 'the great bridge' a richly detailed pictorial record with compelling new perspectives on the construction details of this nineteenth-century engineering feat. A unique feature are the 3D images made from nineteenth-century stereographs. Using the 3D glasses that come with the book, the reader will feel present at the moment the image was captured. This book is a significant contribution to the scholarship on the Brooklyn Bridge and serves as an essential compendium to David McCullough's work.--Anthony M. Cucchiara, Professor Emeritus, Head of Archives and Distinctive Collections, Brooklyn College, 1987-2012; Visiting Professor of Archival Studies, Pratt Institute, 1996-2021 The bridge, with its majestic and inspiring presence, is Brooklyn's gift to the world. The book will fire your passion for this icon to new heights and reaffirm the potential in all of us.--Marty Markowitz, Brooklyn borough president, 2002-2013 This thrilling and richly arranged coffee-table volume will re-ignite your love of the Brooklyn Bridge. Bringing together a trove of archival images, Richman explores the extraordinary story of the bridge's construction--grand, marvelous and sometimes tragic. Richman's epic visual treatment of the bridge's development rightly centers it as one of the greatest engineering achievements in American history.--Greg Young, Best of the Bowery Boys Bookshelf: Holiday gift ideas for history buffs Bowery Boys, (December 16, 2021) Recipient of the 2021 Book Award from The Victorian Society New York.

Author Information

Jeffrey I. Richman has been fascinated by New York City's history for as long as he can remember. In 2007, after 33 years practicing law, representing indigent criminal defendants, he became the full-time historian at Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery. Since then, he has led Green-Wood's Civil War, World War I, and World War II projects which, with the help of hundreds of volunteers, have identified, written, and posted online biographies for thousands of veterans interred there. He blogs about Green-Wood and his latest discoveries and is the author of three books, including Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery: New York's Buried Treasure (1998). He has also co-designed two Green-Wood maps and curated several gallery exhibitions, including three on the Civil War and one on Coney Island. Driven by his passion for history and a long-standing fascination with 19th century New York, Richman is an avid collector who has amassed a notable collection of stereoview and lantern slide photographs of New York City, including many of the Brooklyn Bridge under construction which he has donated to The Green-Wood Historic Fund. One of his fondest memories is of attending the 100th anniversary of the bridge's opening in 1983 - just one milestone in his love affair with the Brooklyn Bridge.

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