A Mexican boat crashes into the Brooklyn Bridge. You couldn’t make it up in Trump’s America

Throughout its history artists have understood this: painters such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Frank Stella, photographers such as Berenice Abbott and Walker Evans, writers such as Arthur Miller and Hart Crane, all have seen how the reality and symbol of this bridge can lift us up – just as its wooden walkway lifts us up over the water when we walk from shore to shore.

Work on the bridge was begun in 1869, four years after the end of the American civil war – the greatest cataclysm the nation has ever seen. It was conceived by John Roebling, a German immigrant; he died following an accident that same year, and the work was taken over and completed by his 32-year-old son, Washington, who had served for four long years in the US army and fought in the great battles – Antietam, Gettysburg, Petersburg – that had, finally, saved the country.

The bridge, a completely unprecedented structure at the time, nearly cost the chief engineer his life. Many men, labourers and skilled workmen from all over the world died during its construction. Many more were injured.

In the long speeches at its opening ceremony, progress was championed; comparisons to the pyramids of Egypt were made. But the final speaker, the Brooklyn pastor Reverend Richard Salter Storrs, drew attention to just who was responsible for this extraordinary achievement.

“It is not to a native American mind that the scheme of construction carried out in this bridge is to be ascribed,” he said, noting John Roebling’s birthplace across a wide ocean. And beyond the vision of the engineer, much of the labour that built the bridge, he said, “came from afar”.

The civil war was not even two decades in the past when he spoke: “The years are not distant in which separated communities regarded each other with aversion and distrust, and the effort was mutual to raise barriers between them, not to unite them in closer alliance.”

It is worth recalling those words today.

The Brooklyn Bridge looks solid, set over the river, bearing cars and taxis and bikes and tourists and New Yorkers day and night, night and day. It is not. Suspension bridges are always in motion: wrap your hand around one of its slender steel cables and you will feel that motion in your body, in your heart. The bridge responds, like a living thing, to weather and pressure and stress. To every footstep it has ever known.

In the century and a half since its opening, it has been witness to disaster, perhaps most memorably on 9/11, when it became a highway for those fleeing from the destruction of the Twin Towers, its own towers suddenly stark and powerful against the wounded skyline. It stands undamaged, the granite of the towers – newly cleaned – shining as bright as they did on that bright May day in 1883. It is a monument to persistence, to unity and peace. Let us hope that the US is as strong and flexible, as resilient as this great bridge.

Photographs by Angela Weiss/AFP, Museum of the City of New York/Getty

Chief Engineer: The Man Who Built the Brooklyn Bridge by Erica Wagner is published by Bloomsbury