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Illus. in: Harper's weekly, 1883 June 2, p. 341. Library of Congress. http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/93512102/
Sitting on one of my many bookcases at home is an item I use as a book-end
something that most people don’t use, a large, heavy piece of cast iron from the 19th-
century called a turnbuckle. But this isn’t just any turnbuckle; you see, it came from one
of the most historic and iconic manmade structures in the world. More than twenty
years after it came into my possession, I still can’t believe I own this special object.
about a foot long, eight inches thick and cylindrical, with flat sides to make tightening
with a huge wrench easier. It weighs about 20 pounds. My turnbuckle is one of thousands
used in the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. It, like the others, is
hollow and threaded at either end, used to connect two, two-inch-thick steel suspension
cables together. The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883 after 13 years of
construction, was the first steel-wire suspension bridge in the world and is the world’s
oldest. My turnbuckle has “Brooklyn 1881” stamped deep into the cast iron.
As a child I traveled across the Brooklyn Bridge in automobiles and saw it from a
distance many, many times. My father was born and raised about twenty-five miles from
Manhattan Island in Montclair, New Jersey, so our family traveled to New York every
year for summer and Christmas vacations to see my grandparents and all of our relations.
While I consider myself a southerner, raised in Dallas and Houston, Texas, I am also part
“Yankee”. The Versfelt Dutch-American ancestry dates back in New England to before
the American Revolutionary War, and my mother’s British-American heritage goes back
even further to the early 1600’s near Boston. The Brooklyn Bridge is one of many very
visible icons of our family story in New York. My grandfather Porter Versfelt Sr. told me
throughout my childhood about his encounters with that bridge (He was born the year it
was completed.), traveling across it over some 90 years of his life on foot, by train, by
automobile and via street car. So you can understand why, in the early 1990’s, when I
finally had the opportunity to stand on the Brooklyn Bridge myself, receiving that
turnbuckle as a gift was a very special event for me.
At that time I worked as a public television producer, director and scriptwriter for
the PBS station at The Pennsylvania State University and its state-wide educational TV
channel. I had chosen the Brooklyn Bridge as one of the backdrops for important parts of
a documentary I was producing about the state of the American economy, in partnership
with the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. In 1993, re-building America’s infrastructure of
highways, roads and bridges was an important topic of the national conversation and I
felt that what better prop could one use to illustrate the importance of transportation
infrastructure than THE Brooklyn Bridge. Plus, I really wanted an excuse to have an all-
expense paid trip to New York City.
Looking back all of these decades later, that moment when I first stepped out of our
TV crew van onto the asphalt surface of the Brooklyn Bridge roadway will be forever
burned into my mind’s eye. It was mid-July, cold and overcast for a New York
summer day. The wind whipped us around relentlessly as we unloaded ourselves and our
TV gear. I was concerned that we wouldn’t have enough sunlight to film our segments
with the host of our program, Patty Sattalia. Despite having a large steel construction
hard hat on her head, as we all did, that vicious wind blew her hair out from underneath
the hat like a scene from a Wagner opera. I could almost hear the off-stage thunder claps
and feel the sense of foreboding in the story. I had just turned thirty-six years old and
I was, frankly, feeling a bit full of myself; I was in charge of a big budget national TV
documentary, head of a crew of some eight people and the instigator for shutting down
one lane of traffic on one of the busiest highway bridges in the world for a good part of
the day.
After a time, we had our camera and audio equipment set up along with our lights.
Police arranged especially for the occasion were directing traffic safely around us, but
they couldn’t keep the aggravated car, truck and bus driver’s anger at being delayed at
bay. We were not the only impediment on the Brooklyn Bridge that day, a multi-year
renovation project had begun recently and all of the thousands of miles of steel-wire
cables and thousands of original 1870’s and 1880’s cast iron turnbuckles were being
replaced. I had been told by the construction supervisor that the wiring and the
turnbuckles could probably last another 50 years at least, but engineers and politicians
were worried anyway, so hundreds of workers were being employed. It was a boost
to the economy, and that was the subject of our documentary.
Because we started shooting in the morning, and the Brooklyn Bridge ran roughly
northwest-to-southeast, I wanted the sun at our backs and behind the camera so our on-
camera host Patty would be illuminated well. It also didn’t hurt that the western end of
the bridge had that lovely and timeless (or so we thought) view of the lower Manhattan
skyline of tall buildings. From our perspective behind the camera, we saw the western
terminus of the bridge behind Patty and just to the left, standing majestically over the
Battery at the tip of the island stood the twin towers of the famous World Trade Center. A
huge American flag, some 20 feet wide and 50 feet long hung vertically from the
overhead girders on the bridge. Those towers and the flag and the New York skyline
added up to one impressive image all in one shot. We had no idea, of course, on that Jul
day of 1993 that just eight years later those towers would be gone, destroyed by 19 Arab
Muslim men and their handlers who wanted to send a terrible message to the United
States. Every time I watch our completed documentary, seeing the old and original World
Trade Center on the screen makes me well up with strong emotions of sadness, regret and
anger. As I write this and bring my memories back to that scene, I listen to Albinoni’s
classical Baroque musical piece Sonata #5 in G Minor and I can’t help but see the old
news video of the passenger jets crashing into the Trade Center towers and a montage of
dust-covered and frightened people running away from them in terror with that music as
the accompaniment.
John A. Roebling, engineer and designer
of the Brooklyn Bridge. Painting (c. 1930?)
of the Brooklyn Bridge. Painting (c. 1930?)
Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 7005, Box 187, Folder 1. http://collections.si.edu/search/results.htm?view=&dsort=&date.slider=&fq=online_media_type%3A%22Images%22&q=john+roebling
After we completed filming our documentary segments that day on the Brooklyn
Bridge, I walked over to the renovation supervisor to thank him for all of his help. He
surprised me with a present, that huge turnbuckle. It was made of cast iron, the iron ore
mined and shipped in from western Pennsylvania. The iron rock was smelted and cast
into this turnbuckle just on the other side of the bridge, in its shadow, in fact, in
Brooklyn. Stamped on my turnbuckle is “Edgemoor - Brooklyn - 1881”. Edgemoor was
the name of the iron foundry. All of the physical strain and risk taken by the men who
mined that iron ore, transported it by railroad and river barge from Pennsylvania to
Brooklyn, the many years of dreaming, planning and personal sacrifice by the engineer
who designed the bridge (John Augustus Roebling), the men who died from the
“bends” (nitrogen narcosis) while digging the underwater stone foundations, all of these
things and much more are wrapped up in my turnbuckle. It is not just a hunk of iron, but
a part of American history. Our history. My history.
Copyright 2014, Porter Versfelt III
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