If you're on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade — or anywhere along Columbia Heights — turn around. Look at the bridge.
This is the view. This is exactly what Washington Roebling saw every single day for eleven years. From a bedroom window. Through a telescope.
His house was at one hundred ten Columbia Heights. Right around here. The building is gone now — demolished by the Jehovah's Witnesses, who bought up most of this block in the twentieth century. But the view is the same. The bridge, right there. The towers. The cables. Manhattan across the water.
Every morning, Washington would watch through his telescope. He'd make notes. Dictate instructions to Emily. She'd walk down the hill, cross to the construction site, deliver the instructions, inspect the work, report back. Every day. For eleven years.
Brooklyn Heights was already the most prestigious neighborhood in the area. Columbia Heights was its best street — Millionaire's Row. The houses looked out over the river. And in eighteen
sixty-nine, when the Roeblings moved in, they looked out over a construction site that half of New York thought was impossible.
Here's a detail that almost seems made up but isn't. In nineteen twenty-four, a poet named Hart Crane moved into one hundred ten Columbia Heights — the exact same building where the Roeblings had lived. From that same window — possibly the very same room — Crane began w
