Saturday is the 125th birthday of that great icon of our city, the Brooklyn Bridge! Man, with it being Fleet Week, Lisa being in town, Memorial Day, and now this, what an exciting weekend! I hope everyone has a blast!
It was so singular a marvel, so ambitious a feat, that its opening drew the U.S. president and a crowd of thousands. A leading national magazine said it stood poised to become “our most durable monument.”
Some 125 years later, the Brooklyn Bridge remains a powerful symbol of engineering might and imagination, and a revered fixture in the landscape of the nation’s largest city.
And it can still draw a crowd. Thousands of people are expected at the bridge’s 125th birthday blowout Thursday, with fireworks, a Navy flyover, a colorful new lighting scheme and the debut of a tribute song scheduled to honor the storied span. It opened on May 24, 1883.
“It’s an icon for not only New York, but for America,” said Brooklyn’s official historian, Ron Schweiger.
The 6,000-foot-long (1829-meter-long) landmark is one of the nation’s oldest suspension bridges and among its most treasured.
From the International Herald Tribune