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THE BRIDGE-BUILDER

I
IN WHICH WE VISIT A PLACE OF UNUSUAL FEARS AND PERILS

AS I went time and again to the great East River Bridge, the new one whose huge steel towers were drawing to full height in the last months of the century, I found myself under a growing impression that here at last was a business with not only danger in it, but fear of danger. Divers and steeple-climbers I had seen who pronounced their work perfectly safe (though I knew better), and balloonists of the same mind about perils of the air; there were none, they declared, despite a list of deaths to prove the contrary. And so on with others. But here on the bridge were men who showed by little things, and sometimes admitted, that they were afraid of the black-ribbed monster. And it seemed to me that these were men with the best kind of grit in them, for although they were afraid of the bridge, they were not afraid of their fear, and they stuck to their job week after week, month after month, facing the same old peril until – well —

I came upon this fear of the bridge the very first time I sought leave to go upon the unfinished structure. It was in a little shanty of an office on the Brooklyn side, where, after some talk, I suggested to an assistant engineer, bent over his plans, that I would like to take a picture or two from the top of the tower. That seemed a simple enough thing.

"Think you can keep your head up there?" said he, with a sharp look.

I told him I had climbed to a steeple-top.

"Yes. But you were lashed fast then in a swing, and had a rope to hold on to. Here you've got to climb up by yourself without anything to hold on to, and it's twice as high as the average steeple."

"How high is that?" I asked.

"Well, the saddles are three hundred and forty feet above the river."

"Saddles?"

"That's what we call 'em. They're beds of steel on top of the towers for the cables to rest on – nice little beds weighing thirty-six tons each."

"Oh!" said I. "How do you get them up?"

"Swing 'em up with steam-derricks and cables. Guess you wouldn't care for that job, hanging out on one o' those booms by your eyelashes."

"Perhaps not," I admitted. "But I'd like to watch it."

He said I must see somebody with more authority, and turned to his plans.

"You don't feel in danger yourself, do you," I persisted, "when you go up?"

"Don't, eh?" he answered. "Well, I nearly got cut in two the other day by a plate-washer. It fell over a hundred feet, and went two inches slam into a piece of timber I was standing on." Then he explained what havoc a small piece of iron – some stray bolt or hammer – can work after a long drop.

"That plate-washer," said he, "weighed only two pounds and a half when it began to fall; but it weighed as much as you do when it struck – and you're a fair size."

"Is that based on calculation," said I, "or is it a joke?"

"It's based on the laws of gravitation," he answered, "and it's no joke for the man who gets hit. Say, why don't you go down in the yard and look around a little?"

I told him I would, and presently went down into the yard, a noisy, confusing place, where the wind was humming through a forest of scaffolding that held the bare black roadway skeleton a hundred feet overhead. It was a long street of iron resting on a long street of wood, with timber and steel built up in X's on X's, the whole rising in an easy slant to yonder grim tower that loomed heavy and ugly against the sky, a huge bow-legged H with the upper half stretched to a great length, and each leg piled up with more black X's held by two enormous ones between. It looked for all the world as if it had come ready made in a box and had been jointed together like children's blocks, which is about the truth, for this great bridge was finished on paper, then in all its parts, before ever a beam of it saw the East River. As I drew near its feet (which could take a row of houses between heel and toe) I had the illusion, due to bigness and height, that the whole tower was rocking toward me under the hurrying clouds; and at first I did not see the workmen swarming over it, they were so tiny.

But they were making noise enough, these workmen, with their striking and hoisting and shouting. There was the ring of hammers, the chunk-chunk of engines, the hiss of steam, the mellow sound of planks falling on planks, and the angry clash of metal. Presently, far up the sides of the tower, I made out painters dangling on scaffolding or crawling out on girders, busy with scrapers and brushes. And higher still I saw the glow of red-hot iron, where the riveters were working. And at the very top I watched black dots of men swing out over the gulf on the monster derrick-booms, or haul on the guiding-lines. And from time to time the signal-bell would send its impatient call to the throttle-man below, six strokes, four strokes, one stroke, telling him what to do with his engine, and to do it quick.

The yardmen seemed to get on in the din by a system of strange yells. Here were a score of sturdy fellows doing something with a long steel floor-beam. They were working in scattered groups, some on the ground, some on the roadway overhead. It was lower pulley-blocks, and spread out flapping cables, and hitch fast the load, all without any hurry. Suddenly a man at the left would put a hand to his mouth and sing out: "Hey-y-y!" and a man overhead would answer: "Yeow-yeow-yeow!" and then they all would cry: "Ho-hoo-ho-hoooo!" and up would go the floor-beam, twisting as she lifted, a nice little load of ten tons, and presently clang down on her lofty bed like a peal of high-pitched thunder.

I chanced to be talking with the yard foreman when there came such a sudden clang, and then I saw an easy-going, rather stolid man pass through a singular transformation. Like a piece of bent steel he sprang back, every muscle in him tense, and up came his arms for defense, and there in his eyes was the look I came to know that meant terror of the bridge, and fear of sudden death. To me, unfamiliar with the constant danger, that clang meant nothing; to him it was like a snarl of the grave.

"Better stand back here," said he, and led me over by the air-compressing engine, where we were out of range.

Then he told how a superintendent of construction had been nearly killed not long before by a piece of falling iron, just where we were standing. And looking up through the criss-cross maze, with openings everywhere from ground to sky, with workmen everywhere handling loose iron, I realized that this was a kind of slow-fire battle-field, not so very glorious, but deadly enough, with shots coming from sky to earth every ten minutes, every half-hour – who can know at what moment the man above him will drop something, or at what moment he himself will drop something on the man below! A tiered-up battle-field, this, where each black X, with its hammers and bolts and busy gang, is a haphazard battery against all the X's below, and a helpless target under all the X's above.

"Why, sir," said the foreman, "that tower went into a reg'lar panic one day because some fool new man on top upset a keg o' bolts. Sounded as if the whole business was coming down on us."

I began to realize what tension these men work under, what vital force they waste in vague alarms!

"It's queer, though," continued the foreman, "how the boys get used to it. See those timbers right at the top that come together in a point? We call that an A-frame; it's for the hoisting. Well, the boys walk those cross-timbers all the time, say a length of thirty feet and a width of one. It's nothing on the ground, but up there with the wind blowing – well, you try it. I saw one fellow do a thing that knocked me. He stopped half-way across a timber not over eight inches wide, took out his match-box, stood on his right foot, lifted his left foot, and struck a match on his left heel. Then he nursed the flame in his hands, got his pipe going good, and walked on across the timber. Wha'd' ye think of that? There he was, balanced on one foot, sir, with an awful death on either side, and the wind just whooping – all because his pipe went out. I wouldn't do it for – for – Well, I wouldn't do it."

"Why didn't he wait to light his pipe until he got across?" I asked.

The foreman shook his head. "I give it up. He just happened to think of it then, and he done it. That's the way they are, some of 'em. Why, there was another fellow, Pat Reagan, as good a man as we've got, and he went sound asleep one day last summer, – it was a nice warm day, – sitting on the top-chord. That's a long, narrow girder at the very highest point of the end-span. First thing we knew, there was Pat, legs dangling, head nodding, comfortable as you please. A few inches either way would have fixed him forever; but he stuck there, by an Irishman's luck, until two of his mates climbed up softly and grabbed him. They didn't dare yell for fear he'd be startled and fall."

While we were talking the wind had strengthened, and now every line and rope on the structure stood out straight from the sides, and swirls of spray from hoisting engines overhead flew across the yard, also occasional splinters. The foreman hurried a man aloft with orders to lash fast everything.

"There's a hard blow coming up," he predicted, "and it 'wouldn't do a thing' to those big timbers on the tower if we left 'em around loose! People have no idea what force is in the wind. Why, sir, I've seen it blow a keg of railroad spikes off that tower clean across the yard. And one day two planks thirteen feet long and two inches thick went flying over the whole approach-works right plumb through the front of a saloon out on the street. That made eight hundred feet the wind carried those planks. As for coats and overalls, why, we've watched lots of 'em start from the tower-top and sail off over Brooklyn city like kites – yes, sir, like kites; and nobody ever knew where they landed."

"I don't see how the men keep their footing in such a gale," I remarked.

"Well," said he, "we order them down when it blows an out-and-out gale, but they work in 'most anything short of a gale. And it's a wonder how they do it. It's not so bad if the wind is steady, for then you can lean against it, same as a man leans on a bicycle going around a curve; but – "

"Do you mean," I interrupted, "that they walk narrow girders leaning against the wind – against a hard wind?"

"Certainly; they have to. But that's not the worst of it. Suppose a man is leaning just enough to balance the wind, and suddenly the wind lets up, say on a gusty day. Then where's your man? Or suppose it's winter and the whole bridge is coated with ice, so that walking girders is like sliding on glass. Then where is he, especially when it's blowing tricky blasts? Oh, it's no dream, my friend, working on a bridge!"

And I, in hearty accord with that opinion, betook me back to the office, where I read just outside the door this ominous notice: "All accidents must be reported as soon as possible, or claims therefor will be disregarded."

A workman came up at this moment, and, with a half-smile, asked if I knew their motto, the motto of the bridge-men.

"No," said I; "what is it?"

"'We never die,'" said he, with a grim glance at the notice; "we don't have to." Then, pointing overhead: "Come up and see us. I'll introduce you to the boys."

II
THE EXPERIENCE OF TWO NOVICES IN BALANCING ALONG NARROW GIRDERS AND WATCHING THE "TRAVELER" GANG

NOT that day, but later on, when I had arranged it. I accepted this bluff invitation and became acquainted with "the boys," the ones who "never die," and took in the fears and wonders of the bridge at closer view. My permit was granted on the express understanding that I hold nobody responsible for any harm that might befall. I was fortunate in having with me as companion in this climb Mr. Varian, the artist, who had faced perils of many sorts, but none like these.

First we clambered, pyramid fashion, up the pile of granite, big as a church, that will hold the cable-ends; they call it the anchorage. From the top of this we could look along the iron street that stretched away in a slight up-grade toward the tower. We were on a level with the roadway of the bridge, and far below us spread the housetops of Brooklyn. Between our stone precipice and the iron street-end yawned a gulf that we drew back from, with water in its deepest bottom. Here the cables would be buried some day, sealed and cemented, piled over with masonry, to hold for centuries.

Standing in the lee of a block that kept off the wind, we looked across at the bridge, and planned how presently we might reach it by skirting the moat-walls and drawing ourselves up at yonder corner where the end-span rested.

Somehow, seen from here, the iron street looked delicate, not massive; its sides were trellis-work, its top frames gently slanting, and one could fancy the whole thing beautifully grown over with vines, a graceful arbor-way suspended in mid-air. And down the length of this came the strangest sounds – one would say a company of woodpeckers of some giant sort making riot in an echoing forest. Br-r-r-ip-ip-ip-ip – br-r-r-r-up-up-up – br-r-r-ap-ap-ap-ap-ap. What was it? Now from this side, up-up-up-br-r-r-up-up, and ending abruptly. Then straightway from near the top on the other side, ap-ap-ap-br-r-r-r-ap-ap-ap. Then fainter from half-way down the street, and then from all points at once, a chorus of hammer-birds making the bridge resound in call and in answer, hammer-birds with strokes as swift as the roll of a drum. What is it?

And look! Those points of fire that glow forth here and there and vanish as the eye perceives them, tiny red lights, tiny yellow lights, that flash from far down the iron street and are gone, that flash from all along the iron street and are gone! What are they? What strange work is doing here?

It was the riveters driving the endless red-hot bolts that hold the bridge together, driving them with hammers that you work with a trigger, and aim like a fireman's hose, hammers with rubber pipes dragging behind that feed in compressed air from an engine. Long past are the days when bolts were driven by brawny arms and the slow swing of a sledge. Now the workman, leaning his stomach against an iron club, touches a spring, and, presto! the hard-kicking, pent-up air inside drives the darting club-head back and forth, back and forth, quick as a snake strikes, br-r-r-r-r-ip-ip-ip-ip, against whatever the steering arms may press it. Driving rivets nowadays is something like handling a rapid-fire gun. And how your body aches from the bruise of that recoil!

"We must get nearer to those fellows," said the artist; and presently, after some mild hazards, we were safely over on the span, quite as near as was desirable to a gang of riveters dangling twenty feet above us on a swing. For presently, with a sputter of white sparks, a piece of red-hot iron struck the girder we were straddling, and then went bounding down – down —

"Nice, hospitable place, this!" remarked the artist, as we edged under cover of a wide steel beam.

Crouching here, we watched another gang of riveters on the structure opposite, where we had a better view, watched the forge-man pass along the glowing rivets, and the buffer-man slip them through ready holes, and the hammer-man flatten the flaming ends into smooth, burnished heads. And presently a riveter in black cap and faded blue jersey climbed down from the swing overhead, and explained things to us. He did this out of sheer good nature, I think, although he may have been curious to know what two men with derby hats and kodaks were doing up there. We watched his descent in wonder and alarm, for it involved some lively gymnastics, that he entered upon, however, with complete indifference. First he swung across from the scaffolding to a girder, the highest rail of the bridge, and along this walked as coolly as a boy on a wide fence-top, only this happened to be a fence one hundred and fifty feet high. Then he bent over and caught one of the slanting side supports, and down this worked his way as a mountain-climber would work down a precipice. Presently he stepped off at our level, never having taken the pipe from his mouth.

When we asked how he dared go about so carelessly over a reeling abyss, he said they all did it; they all got used to it, or else got killed. Why, when the whistle blew we'd see men swinging and sliding and twisting their way down like a lot of circus performers. That's how they came to dinner; that's how they got back aloft. No, sir; they couldn't use life-lines; they moved about too much. Besides, what good would a life-line be to a man if the "falls" started at him with a ten-ton load, yes, or a twenty-ton load? That man has got to skip along pretty lively, sir, or he'll get hurt. Did he mean skip along over this web of boards and girders? I inquired. He certainly did, and we'd see plenty of it, if we stayed up long. The artist and I shook our heads as we looked down that skeleton roadway, gaping open everywhere between girders and planks, in little gulfs, ten feet wide, five feet wide, two feet wide, quite wide enough to make the picture of a man skipping over them a very solemn thing.

Our friend went on to tell us how the riveters often get into tight places, say on the tower, where there is so little room for the forge-man to heat his bolts that he has to throw them up to the hammer-man, twenty or thirty feet.

"What!" exclaimed the artist. "Throw red-hot bolts twenty or thirty feet up the tower!"

"That's what they do; and we've got boys who are pretty slick at it. They'll grab a bolt out of the fire with long-handled nippers, and give her a swing and a twist, and away she goes sizzling through the air straight at the man above; and say, they don't miss him once in a hundred times; and, what's more, they never touch a truss or girder. If they did there'd be a piece of red-hot iron sailing down on the lads below, and that wouldn't be good for their health."

"How does the hammer-man catch these red-hot bolts?" I asked.

"In a bucket. Catches 'em every time. That's a thing you want to see, too."

There were so many things we wanted to see in this strange region! And presently we set forth down the iron street, keeping in mind a parting caution of the riveter not to look at our feet, but at the way before us, and never to look down. As we edged ahead cautiously (no skipping along for us, thanks, but pausing often, and holding fast to whatever offered support), we saw that all the bridge-men come over the girders, eyes straight ahead, in a shuffling, flat-footed way, without much bend in the knees. Look, there comes one of them in from the end of a long black arm that pushes out like a bowsprit over the gulf! He has been hanging out there, painting the iron. In the pose of his body he is a tight-rope walker, in the hitch of his legs he is a convict, in the blank stare of his face he is a somnambulist. Really he is nothing so complicated, but an every-day bridge-man earning a hard living; and his wife would be torn with fears could she see him now.

Presently we came to the busiest scene on the structure, down where the covered part ended and the iron roadway reached on, bare of framework, to the tower. Here the "traveler" was working with a double gang of men, raising a skeleton of sides and cross-beams that were pushing on, pushing on day by day, and would finally stretch across the river. Once on the "traveler's" deck, we breathed easier, for here we were safe from fearsome crevasses, safe on a great wide raft of iron and timber, set on double railroad tracks, a lumbering steam-giant that goes resounding along, when the need is, with its weight of four locomotives, its three-story derricks swinging out great booms at the corners, its thumping niggerhead engines (two of them) for the hoisting, its coal-bins, its water-tanks, its coils of rope, its pile of lumber, and its mascot kitten, curled up there by the ash-box in a workman's coat. They say the bridge has to wait when that kitten wants her dinner, and woe to the man who would treat the little thing unkindly!

This "traveler," with its gangs, is a sort of gigantic sewing-machine that stitches the bridge together; it lifts all the parts into place and binds them fast, as it were, with basting-threads of temporary iron, to hold until the riveters arrive for the permanent sewing. Five or six tons is the weight of ordinary pieces handled by the traveler, but some pieces weigh twenty tons, and, on a pinch, forty tons could be managed, the weight of six elephants like Jumbo. Of course, when I say that the traveler "stitches" these pieces together, I really mean that the "traveler" gangs do this, for the big brute booms can only lift things and swing things; the bolt-driving and end-fitting must be done by little men.

When we arrived the "traveler" was bringing to one spot the massive parts of a cross-section in our arbor-way. It was a stretched-out iron W, flattened down between girders across top and bottom. This, we learned, was a "strut," and it weighed sixteen tons, and it would presently be lifted bodily overhead to span the roadway. We waited a full hour to see this thing done – to watch another stitch taken in the bridge; and it seems to me, as I think of it, that I can recall no hour when I saw so many perils faced with such indifference.

First, the booms would drop down their clanking jaws and grip the chain-bound girders from little delivery cars, then swing them around to the lifting-place at the farther end of the traveler. Now we understood what our friend down the way meant by "skipping along lively when the falls come at you." He meant this boom-tackle and its load as they sweep over the structure in blind, merciless force. And, indeed, they did skip along, the bridge-men, as the traveler turned its arms this way and that, and several times I saw a man slip as he hurried, and barely save himself. A single misstep might mean the crush of a ten-ton mass, or a plunge into space, or both. It seemed a pretty shivery choice.

"One of our boys got hit this morning," said a man.

"Hit by the falls?"

"Yes; he tried to dodge, but his foot caught somehow, and he got it hard right here." He touched his thigh. "It flattened him out, just over there where that man's making fast the load."

"Was he badly hurt?"

"Pretty bad, I guess. He couldn't get up, and we lowered him in a coal-box with a runner; that's a single line. You see, it's very easy to take a wrong step."

Presently somebody yelled something, and this man moved away to his task; but we were joined almost immediately by another bridge-man, who told us how they ride the big steel columns from the ground clear to the cap of the tower. Two men usually ride on a column, their duty being to keep her from bumping against the structure as she lifts, and then bolt her fast when she reaches the top. Of course, as a tower grows in height, these rides become more and more terrifying, so that some of the men who are equal to anything else draw back from riding up a column.

These fears were justified just at the last on the New York tower, and a man named Jack McGreggor had an experience that might well have blanched his hair. They had reached the 325-foot level, and were placing the last lengths of column but one, and McGreggor was riding up one of these lengths alone. It was a huge mass twenty-five feet long, square in section, and large enough to admit a winding ladder inside. It weighed eighteen tons. As the overhead boom lifted the pendent length (with McGreggor astride) and swung it clear of the column it was to rest on, the foreman, watching there like a hawk, wiggled his thumb to the signal-man on a platform below, who pulled four strokes on the bell, which meant "boom up" to the engine-man. So up came the boom, and in came the column, hanging now in true perpendicular, with McGreggor ready to slide down from his straddling seat for the bolting.

Now the foreman flapped his hand palm down, and the signal-man was just about to jerk two bells, which means "lower your load," when rip – smash – tear! Far down below a terrible thing had happened: the frame of the engine had snapped right over the bearing, and out pulled the cable drum that was holding the strain of that eighteen-ton column, and down came the falls. It was just like an elevator breaking loose at the top of its shaft. The column started to fall; there was nothing to stop it; and then – and then a miracle was worked; it must have been a miracle; it is so extraordinary. That falling column struck squarely, end to end, on the solid column beneath it, rocked a little, righted itself, and stayed there! Which was more than Jack McGreggor did, for he came sliding down so fast – he came with a wild, white face – that he all but knocked the foreman over; and the foreman was white himself. And what that eighteen-ton column would have done to the bridge, and the boys on it, had it crashed down those three hundred and twenty-five feet, is still a subject of awed discussion.

All this time a dozen men have been swarming over the strut, hammering bolts, tightening nuts, hitching fast the "falls," making sure that all parts are rigid and everything ready for the lifting. At the front of the traveler two foremen, "pushers" they are called, yell without ceasing: "Hey, Gus! Hey! Hey, Jimmie! Put that winch in! Slack away them falls! What the mischief are you doing? Hey! Hey!" And they shake their hands and dance on their toes, for all the world like a pair of mad auctioneers.

The men work faster under this vigorous coaching. Four or five are stretched flat on their stomachs along the top girder, as many more cling to steep slanting braces, and some hang fast to the uprights, with legs twisted around them like Japanese pole-climbers. No matter what his position, every man plies a tool of some sort – wrench, chisel, or sledge, and presently all is ready.

Now the niggerheads start with a pounding and sputtering that make the bridge quiver. The big spools haul fast on the ropes, the falls stiffen, the booms creak, and with shouts from every one, the strut heaves and lifts and hangs suspended. The "pushers" yell at the niggerheads to stop. The men swarm over the load, studying every joint, then wave that all is well, and come sliding, twisting down just as the engines start again, all but two men, who sit at the ends and ride along with the hoist. Meantime the others are racing up the side frames, from slant to slant to the top of the truss, where they wait eagerly, yelling the while, at the points on either side, where presently the strut-ends must be adjusted and then bolted fast.

It seems like some mad school-boy game of romps. Now we'll all swing over this precipice! Whoop-la! Now we'll all run across this gulf! Wow! wow! wow! Every man in that scrambling crew is facing two deaths, or three deaths, and doing hard work besides. Look! There comes the strut up to its place, and nearly crushes Jimmie Dunn with its sharp edge, as a strut did crush another lad not so long ago. And see that man hang out in a noose of a rope, hang out over nothing, and drive in bolts. And see this fellow kick off on the free pulley-block and come sliding down. Hoooo! And there are the others jumping at the falls after him, and coming down with a rush, laughing. Risking their lives? One would say they never thought of it.

"Why, that's nothing!" said one of them; "we used to slide down the falls from the top of the tower. But you've got to know the trick or the ropes'll burn through your trousers. It's a great slide, though."

"Aren't you ever afraid of falling?" I asked a serious-faced young man who was running one of the niggerheads.

"I'll tell you how it is," said he; "we're not afraid when a lot of us do a thing together, but each one might be afraid to do it alone. In our hearts I guess we're all afraid."

"Ever have an accident yourself?"

"No," he said, "but – " He hesitated, and then explained that he had been standing near the day "Chick" Chandler fell from the Brooklyn tower. It hadn't been a nice thing to see, and —

Finally I got the story. Chandler, it seems, was the first man killed on the bridge, and he died for a jest. He was working that day on the one-hundred-and-ten-foot level; he was an experienced man and counted sure of foot. It had begun to sprinkle, and the men were looking about for their rain-coats, when Chandler, in a spirit of mischief, started across a girder for an oil-skin that belonged to a comrade. And so interested was he in this little prank that he forgot prudence, perhaps forgot where he was, and the next second he was falling, and presently there was the shock of impact far below, and then a red No. 1 was branded on the ugly black bridge.