Don’t let the Brooklyn Bridge or her many camera-wielding admirers fool you. There’s more to the 133-year-old structure than just her Gothic-style towers and web of steel cables. Look beyond the iconic physical features and you’ll find depth, as a trip across her pedestrian walkway will reveal.
I waxed reverently about the sweeping views she offers of Manhattan’s skylines, both downtown and uptown, in “Brooklyn Bridge Walk Puts the Spiritual in Secularism,” a blog I created last summer after I crossed the walkway from Brooklyn to Manhattan and back during dusk and dark.
That blog was heavy on images of Lower Manhattan, where one World Trade Center is the center of attention and a darling of photographers. Recently, though, while filing away the photos I took that evening, I noticed several shots that I surprisingly left on the cutting room floor. I decided these images deserved their own viewing before I had them hibernate on my Mac.
The Midtown skyline, of course, is a constellation of iconic, less-celebrated and up-and-coming structures competing for attention. The competitors include the bold Empire State Building, shiny Chrysler Building, broad MetLife Building, and svelte 432 Park Avenue luxury apartments. Meanwhile, the mere 50-story Metropolitan Life Insurance Tower rears his belltower and the New York Life Building brandishes his gilded pyramidal crown above the crowd of other buildings of tempered star power.
They are all right there, set against the sky, just over or through the neighboring Manhattan Bridge. All one should need to do is look to notice that the Brooklyn Bridge is much more than just her stylish stone-and-metal allure.