tells us absolutely nothing of all this. The cable simply disappears on one side and reappears on the other, as if it were two separate cables, one on each side, instead of one continuous chain. Look at this section of the top of the tower, and see how an exquisite refinement of mechanical arrangement may coexist with absolute insensibility to the desirableness even of an architectural expression of this arrangement. The architecture of this crowning member of the tower has nothing whatever to do with the purpose for which the structure exists. Is it not perfectly evident that an architectural expression of this mechanical arrangement would require that the line of the summit, instead of this meaningless flat coping, should, to begin with, be a crest of roof, its double slope following the line of the cable which it shelters? Here the very channel through which the cable runs is not designed, but is a mere hole occurring casually, and not by premeditation, in the midst of the mouldings which form the cornice of the tower. This is architectural barbarism.
Other opportunities offered for architectural expression in the towers themselves were in the treatment of the buttresses, in the treatment of the balconies which girdle the tower at the height of the roadway, and in the modelling of the arches. The girth of each of the towers at the water-line is 398 feet. At the roof-course it is 378 feet. The reduction is effected by means of five or six offsets, which withdraw each face of the tower four feet between the bottom and the top, and each end six feet. The counter-forts, eight in all, on the sides of the outer piers and on the faces of all the piers, are mere applied strips, very shallow in proportion to their width, and terminating in the capital-like projections which are casually pierced to receive the cables. It may make, perhaps, no serious difference in the mechanical efficiency of these counter-forts whether their area be narrow and deep or broad and shallow. But an increase of depth in proportion to width would of itself, with its higher lights and sharper shadows, have made forcible masses of what are now ineffectual features. This inherent effect would be very greatly enhanced if the offsets themselves were accentuated by sharp and decisive modelling. As it is, emphasis seems to have been studiously avoided. The offsets are merely long batterings of the wall, which do nothing to separate the piers into related parts with definite transitions, and so to refine the crudity of the masses. To see the difference between a mechanical and a monumental conception of a great structure, compare these towers with the front of Amiens, or of Strasburg, or of Notre Dame of Paris. Of course the designer of a modern bridge must not attempt to reproduce in his work “those misty masses of multitudinous pinnacle and diademed tower.” That would be a more fatal fault than the rudeness and crudeness with which we have to charge the design of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. The ornament of the cathedrals, so far as it is separable from their structure, has nothing for the designer of the bridge even of suggestion. But to see how masses may be modelled so as to be made to speak, look at the modelled masses of the tower of Amiens, the stark lines of essential structure framing the screen of wall between them, in contrast with the uniform deadness here of buttress and curtain wall; the crisp emphasis of lines of light and hollows of black shade which mark the transitions between parts of structure in the west front of Rheims, in contrast with the lack of emphasis in the offsets of the bridge tower; the spirit of the gargoyled balconies that belt the towers of Notre Dame, and the spiritlessness of the parapeted balconies that encircle the tower of the bridge. And note, too (we are not now speaking of the decoration of the cathedrals), that all this transcendent superiority arises merely from a development and emphasis of the inherent expression of the masses themselves, which in the bridge are left so crude, and in the cathedral towers are refined so far. It need not, and indeed should not, have been carried so far in this architecture of reason and utility as in the architecture of a poetical religion. The mere rudiments of those works would have furnished all the expression that is necessary or desirable here. But these rudiments are wanting. What can we say but that the designer of the cathedral began where the designer of the bridge left off? If our New-Zealander should extend his travels, and come upon these monuments also, what would be his surprise at finding documentary proof that the bridge was built six hundred years after the cathedrals, and that the generation which built the bridge looked backward and downward upon the generation which built the cathedrals as rude and barbarous and unreasoning in comparison with themselves!
What we have said of the towers is true also of the anchorages. The bowlder which the Peruvian rolls upon the end of his rope to hold it down is here a mass of 60,000 tons. Scientifically it is adjusted to its purpose, no doubt, with the most exact nicety. Artistically it is still but a bowlder rolled upon a rope. It would probably be impracticable to exhibit the anchor plate which takes the ultimate strain of this mile and more of cable, though we may be sure that our Greek or our Gothic bridge-builder would not have admitted its impracticability without as exhaustive an investigation as the modern bridge-builder has given to the mechanical aspects of his problem. But it was certainly practicable to indicate the function of the anchorage itself, to build it up in masses which should seem to hold the cable to the earth, or a double arch like—or rather unlike—the double arch of the main tower, turned between piers which should visibly answer the same purpose. Instead of either of these, or of any technical device for the same purpose, the weight above is a crude mass, so far from being adapted to its function in its form, that one has to look with some care to find it from the street below, and to distinguish it from the approaches.
What we have called the balconies at the level of the roadway are not “practical” balconies, since they open from the driveways, and not from the walk, and are not accessible as points of view. The purpose of a projection at this point is to secure as great a breadth as possible for the system of wind-braces under the floor of the bridge. This purpose is attained by the projection, but is only masked by the imitations of balconies, instead of being architecturally expressed, as it might have been unmistakably expressed, by the bold projection of a granite spur from the angle of the pier.
There are, probably, few arches in the world—certainly there can be none outside of works of modern engineering—of anything like the span, height, thickness, and conspicuousness of those in the bridge towers which are so little effective. Like the brute mass of wall above them, they are impressive only by magnitude. The great depth of the archway is only seen as a matter of mensuration, not felt as a poetical impression, as it would have been if the labors of the constructor had been supplemented by the labors of an artist; if the shallow strips of pier had become real buttresses, and the jamb and arch had been narrowed by emphatic successions of withdrawal, instead of being merely tunnelled through the mass; if the intrados of the arch itself had been accentuated by modelling, instead of being weakened by the actual recession of its voussoirs behind the plane of the wall.
SECTION OF TOP AND BACK OF ANCHORAGE.