The Brooklyn Bridge and the Family That Built It
Our American Stories
iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 817 Ratings
🗓️ 6 April 2026
⏱️ 11 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this episode of Our American Stories, The Brooklyn Bridge opened in 1883 and quickly became one of the most remarkable engineering achievements in the world. Spanning the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, it created a lasting connection between two rapidly growing communities.
But the bridge’s story is also the story of a family. After its designer, John Roebling, died during construction, his son Washington took over as chief engineer, only to be left bedridden by illness. From there, his wife Emily stepped in, helping oversee the project and carry it through to completion. The History Guy joins us to share the story of one of America’s greatest modern marvels and the people who made it possible.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.6 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:14.1 | And we continue here with our American stories. |
| 0:18.2 | And our next story comes to us from a man who is simply known as the History Guy. |
| 0:23.2 | His videos are watched by hundreds of thousands of people of all ages on YouTube. |
| 0:28.8 | The History Guy has also heard here regularly on Our American Stories. |
| 0:33.2 | The Brooklyn Bridge represented the growth and might of the Industrial Age and the coming of |
| 0:39.8 | age of the United States and its largest city. |
| 0:44.0 | Here's the history guy with the story. |
| 0:47.0 | May 24th, 1883, one of the great marvels of the Industrial Age was open to the public |
| 0:51.2 | for the very first time. |
| 0:52.7 | A procession of 24 coaches, first one of which |
| 0:55.0 | carried U.S. President Chester Arthur and New York City Mayor Franklin Edson, across the |
| 0:58.6 | 6,000 16-foot suspension bridge, one and a half times longer than any suspension bridge that had |
| 1:03.9 | been built to that time, across the East River between New York City on Manhattan Island |
| 1:09.3 | and Brooklyn on Long Island. The headline of the New York Times |
| 1:13.2 | that day read two great cities united, although the Times gave it relative opinion of those two |
| 1:18.3 | great cities the next day when they mentioned that the residents of Brooklyn would be happy to |
| 1:22.5 | avoid a sometimes difficult ferry ride, but the residents of New York City had no great cause for |
| 1:27.4 | celebration as not one in a thousand of them would ever find occasion to use difficult ferry ride but the residents of New York City had no great cause for celebration |
| 1:28.5 | as not one in a thousand of them would ever find occasion to use the new structure. |
| 1:34.6 | The carriage carrying President Arthur and Mayor Edson was not actually the first carriage |
... |
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