A Vintage Love Letter to NYC’s Heat as the Ultimate Class Equalizer

How the extremities of the thermometer bridge the most insurmountable of social barriers.

As New York enters a record-breaking heat wave this week, I was reminded of a wonderful passage from Manhattan ’45 (public library), titled thusly because it sounds “partly like a kind of gun; and partly like champagne,” by the Welsh historian and prolific travel writer Jan Morris* — easily the most beautifully written love letter to New York City since E. B. White’s iconic Here Is New York, one of my all-time favorite texts. Morris paints a portrait of the city as it was on June 25, 1945 — the day 14,000 American servicemen and women, the first contingent returning from the victory over Nazi Germany, sailed into New York aboard the British liner Queen Mary — reconstructed in 1987, when the book was originally published. In this excerpt from the closing of Chapter 4, “On Class,” Morris captures the remarkable unifying force of New York City heat, something to quietly celebrate as we brush up against sweaty strangers on the subway and exchange wistfully knowing nods.

[W]hen a heat wave left the whole city gasping and sweating, a powerful fellowship blunted the edge of the common misery, bridging the most insuperable linguistic barriers, or the most unclimbable social barricades, if only with a wink or a grimace.

Morris goes on to extend this amalgamation of difference into fellowship, driven by the forces of the city’s circumstance, to the very fabric of citizenship:

And anyway citizenship of this city in itself made for a bond beyond class. To be a citizen of Manhattan was an achievement in itself — it had taken guts and enterprise, if not on your own part, at least on your forebears’. The pressures of the place, its competition, its pace, its hazards, even the fun of it, demanded special qualities of its people, and gave them a particular affinity for one another. They were all an elite!

*Morris herself is very much a character worthy of New York City’s colorful spirit. Born as James Morris in 1926, the father of five children and a WWII vet, she had gender reassignment surgery in 1972 after eight years of medical transition. She had to travel to Morocco to have the procedure performed, since British doctors wouldn’t agree to do it unless Morris divorced the children’s mother, Elizabeth Tuckniss, which she refused to do. The two eventually divorced, but remained close and were legally reunited in a civil partnership in 2008, when Morris was 82. You can hear Morris in conversation with NYPL’s Paul Holdengräber.

Thanks, Chel

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The Great Bridge: An Essential History of the Brooklyn Bridge

What wire-walkers and medical mysteries have to do with the world’s deepest pit and the secret female engineer behind an architectural icon.

On the afternoon of August 24, 1876, an announcement was made in the Brooklyn Eagle that a man would attempt to cross the Brooklyn Bridge. The next day, thousands of people lined the river on the Manhattan and Brooklyn waterfronts to see the feat. Built over the past six years, the massive anchors of the bridge were the tallest structures in the city, twin cathedrals on the river. Between them was a negative space of huge potential, the largest suspension bridge in the world. For the moment, however, the bridge was nothing but a single string cable, impossibly thin and hard to see, twisting in the wind.

At half past one, E.F. Farrington, the sixty-year-old Master Mechanic of the massive architectural project, stepped onto a boatswain’s chair — essentially a two-foot plank of wood — and swung out over the river. Below, a traffic-jam of sailboats and ferries had stopped to watch as a man seemingly flew above them, reaching the other side in seven minutes to a huge shout from the Brooklyn side. The first crossing of the Brooklyn Bridge had been achieved.

The Great Bridge (public library), David McCullough’s phenomenal 1972 history of a bridge that has been an icon of the city for nearly 130 years, has been reissued this year for its 40th anniversary. The story that McCullough tells is a thrilling tale of engineering genius, bureaucratic hang-ups, medical breakthroughs, and an architectural ambition that transformed New York forever.

On August 24, 1876, E.F. Farrington, Master Mechanic of the Brooklyn Bridge, made the first crossing across the East River on a wire.

Like the vision of a man zip-lining across the East River, The Great Bridge tells many little-known facts about the bridge, including the daily toil of “caisson disease” — better known today as the bends — on the bridge workers. It was an illness that stupefied medical professionals and struck down the engineer of the bridge itself, Washington Roebling, who had taken over the project after the death of his father, J.A. Roebling.

After the single-wire crossing, bridge-workers, many of whom were former sailors, would start to attach the suspension cables. (Brooklyn Museum)

There were two phases of work for those who toiled on the bridge: the six-year project to dig out the bases for the two towers, and the stringing of the cables, which took nearly as long. The first workers were expected to work in shifts of five or six hours down in the “caisson,” the massive pit that anchored the structure to the earth. There was no deeper pit in the world, and the men who went down into it would travel through several airlocks.

Inside the caisson everything wore an unreal, weird appearance….With the flaming lights, the deep shadows, the confusing noise of hammers, drills, and chains, the half-naked forms flitting about, with here and there a Sisyphus rolling his stone, one might, if of a poetic temperament, have a realizing sense of Dante’s inferno.

More than two hundred workers would descend into the caisson each day, and newspaper reporters would relate their stories of the slimy, hot, airless working conditions.

As the depth increased, so did the danger — and so did the pay. A man working in the pit could make in hours what a regular laborer might make in a month. But soon men started to come out of the hole dizzy and bleeding, and a doctor was called to investigate the illness that seemed to strike down everyone who went down below. The doctor then realized that the sickness only struck men who scrambled to get out of the hellish hole, rather than those who gradually came out over the course of an hour or so. It was one of the first diagnoses of the bends in human history.

A view of Brooklyn from the bridge, c. 1876 (Brooklyn Museum)

One of those to become very sick from the bends was chief engineer Washington Roebling, who had taken over the project when his father died. Halfway through the construction, Roebling became confined to his home in Brooklyn Heights, where he could watch the progress from a second-floor window. His wife, Emily, became the public face of the project. She would meet with his engineers, suppliers, and business partners in the parlor of their house, learning complex matters of physics about the strength of cable and the catenary curves necessary for a successful suspension.

After chief engineer became sick due to the bends while working on the Bridge, Emily Roebling would take over many of her husband's duties, teaching herself the essentials of physics, architecture, and engineering. (Brooklyn Museum)

Emily Roebling would also travel to the site to walk the temporary footbridge that became a dangerous but popular attraction for New Yorkers: “Safe for only 25 men at one time,” a sign read at the entrance. “Do not walk close together nor run, jump, or trot. Break step!”

The temporary footbridge that allowed workers to access the cable was also a popular tourist attraction. (Nationaal Archief)

When the bridge opened in 1883, it was called the “Eighth Wonder of the World,” and rightly so. No project had combined such expertise in excavation, suspension, and architectural aesthetics in one of the busiest metropolises in the world. Much like New York Diaries and The Greatest Grid, The Great Bridge is a reminder that any enduring symbol is constructed from a constellation of stories.

Michelle Legro is an associate editor at Lapham’s Quarterly. You can find her on Twitter.

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Legendary Graphic Designer Milton Glaser on Art, Purpose, and the Capacity for Astonishment

“That’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears.”

Today marks the 83rd birthday of Milton Glaser, considered by many — myself included — the greatest graphic designer alive, and frequently celebrated alongside Saul Bass as the most influential graphic designer of all time.

Today also marks 10 weeks since beloved Brooklyn-based designer, author, and filmmaker Hillman Curtis passed away after a fiercely fought battle with cancer. Last week, I joined much of New York’s design community in a celebration of Hillman’s films, among which is his extraordinary artist series profiling prominent creators. So, today, let’s take a bittersweet moment to celebrate a great legacy and a great life with Hillman Curtis’s beautiful and affectionate profile of Milton Glaser:

Glaser adds to this omnibus of history’s finest definitions of art:

Art performs this pacifying function in culture… Its practitioners create commonalities… I always quote a guy named Lewis Hyde, who wrote about primitive cultures, where there’s an exchange of gifts that cannot be kept but have to be passed on. And the passing on of gifts is a device to prevent people from killing one another, because they all become part of a single experience. And his leap of imagination occurs when he says, ‘And this is what artists do in culture — artists provide that gift to the culture, so that people have something in common.’

And I think that for all of us who identify with the role of artists in history have that intuition about things, and want our work to serve that purpose.

Glaser echoes other great minds’ insights on purpose, articulating something many of us relate to on a deep level:

There’s nothing more exciting than seeing someone whose life has been affected in a positive way by something you’ve said. There’s nothing more exciting than to see somebody change from a sort of condition of inertness or inattentiveness into a mind that begins to inquire about meaning.

I think if you don’t do something to project into the future that way, the possibility for total self-absorption and narcissism becomes very much greater.

Finally, he offers some invaluable advice on the progression of the creative life into old age, wrapped in a broader meditation on the universal power of art:

If you can sustain your interest in what you’re doing, you’re an extremely fortunate person. What you see very frequently in people’s professional lives, and perhaps in their emotional life as well, is that they lose interest in the third act. You sort of get tired, and indifferent, and, sometimes, defensive. And you kind of lose your capacity for astonishment — and that’s a great loss, because the world is a very astonishing place.

What I feel fortunate about is that I’m still astonished, that things still amaze me. And I think that that’s the great benefit of being in the arts, where the possibility for learning never disappears, where you basically have to admit you never learn it.

For the definitive collection of Glaser’s most memorable work, treat yourself to the 1973 tome Milton Glaser: Graphic Design.

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