Cross the Bridge.

Hidden Histories in the Spans of New York

The Brooklyn Bridge killed its designer before it was finished. John Augustus Roebling, the civil engineer who conceived the bridge, was standing at the Fulton Ferry Landing in June 1869 surveying the tower site when a ferryboat pinched his foot against a dock piling. His toes were amputated, and he died of tetanus three weeks later. His son Washington Roebling took over, but he too was felled — by caisson disease (the bends) suffered while supervising workers in the pressurized underwater chambers beneath the river. Washington directed the remaining eleven years of construction from his window at 110 Columbia Heights in Brooklyn Heights, using a telescope and his wife Emily as his messenger. Emily Warren Roebling effectively ran the project, studying engineering, managing the contractor relationships, and crossing the completed bridge first on May 24, 1883, carrying a rooster as a symbol of victory. Inside the two Gothic towers, the Roebling family had built a pair of vaulted chambers — today famous as the archway vaults on the Manhattan side — that were rented as wine storage through much of the 20th century and still hold the smell of old oak.

The High Bridge, which crosses the Harlem River between Washington Heights and the Bronx, is the oldest standing bridge in New York City, completed in 1848 as part of the Croton Aqueduct system. For decades it carried fresh water from upstate reservoirs into Manhattan inside a masonry arch that Roman engineers would have recognized — it was modeled directly on the Pont du Gard in southern France. The bridge was closed to pedestrians in 1970 after repeated incidents of rocks being thrown at boats below, and it sat abandoned for 45 years before reopening in 2015 after a $61 million restoration. Few New Yorkers have walked it. On the Williamsburg Bridge, opened in 1903, engineers discovered during a 1988 inspection that the main suspension cables had corroded so severely the bridge was on the verge of collapse — a secret the city kept quiet for months while debating whether to demolish it entirely. The $300 million repair project that followed is still considered one of the most complex structural restorations in American history.

A StoryHunt along NYC's bridges sends you to places most pedestrians rush through without looking down. Your phone guides you to the spot beneath the Manhattan Bridge where a community of people lived in the arch for years during the 1980s, to the plaque on the Queensboro Bridge marking where F. Scott Fitzgerald set a scene in The Great Gatsby, and to the time capsule sealed inside the cornerstone of the Brooklyn Bridge's Manhattan tower in 1876 — a zinc box containing a Bible, newspapers from the day, coins, and a photo of the Roebling family that may still lie there undisturbed. Every clue connects structure to story. You don't need a guide or a hard hat. Just your phone and a good pair of shoes.