President Chester Arthur and New York Governor Grover Cleveland led a procession across the bridge, capping fourteen years of construction that killed at least 27 workers, including chief engineer John Roebling. His son Washington Roebling finished the project despite being partially paralyzed by decompression sickness suffered while working in the underwater caissons. Fireworks and a flotilla of ships marked the opening, and over 150,000 people crossed on foot the first day.
The bridge had swallowed lives before it carried a single wagon. John Roebling, its designer, died of tetanus after a ferry accident injured his foot while surveying the site. His son Washington took over, only to be crippled by 'caisson disease'—what we now call decompression sickness—from working in pressurized chambers dug into the riverbed. He directed much of the remaining construction from his apartment window with a telescope, relaying instructions through his wife, Emily Warren Roebling, who became a de facto chief engineer herself.
When it opened, the bridge was a marvel of steel-wire cable technology, its Gothic stone towers rising 276 feet above the East River. Skeptics had doubted such cables could hold; a week later a stampede triggered by a woman's fall on the stairs killed twelve people, feeding rumors the bridge was collapsing. P.T. Barnum settled the public's nerves the following year by parading 21 elephants across it.
The bridge remains, still carrying traffic, a monument to a family's obsession and the era's brutal appetite for engineering triumph regardless of human cost.