ba-dev-hermit-hut
Sentence Switcher
Intertextual Reference
Quiz
Art
Your Poem
Random
Export as Markdown
Click sentences from quotes below to build your poem
— The Great Bridge - David McCullough
Most appealing of all for the Brooklyn people who went to New York to earn a living every day was the prospect of a safe, reliable alternative to the East River ferries.
Winds, storms, tides, blizzards, ice jams, fog, none of these, they were told, would have the slightest effect on Mr.
Roebling’s bridge.
There would be no more shoving crowds at the ferryhouse loading gates.
There would be no more endless delays.
One Christmas night a gale had caused the river to be so low the ferries ran aground and thousands of people spent the night in the Fulton Ferry house.
Many winters when the river froze solid, there had been no service at all for days on end.
Some of the Brooklyn business people and Kings County politicians were even claiming that the bridge would make Brooklyn the biggest city in America, a most heady prospect indeed and not an unreasonable one either.
Congressman Demas Barnes contended Brooklyn would be the biggest city in the world, once New York was “full.” ==New York, that “human hive” John Roebling called it, was running out of space, its boundaries being forever fixed by nature.
Roebling and others envisioned a day when all Manhattan Island would be built over, leaving “no decent place” to make a home, neither he nor anyone else thus far having imagined a city growing vertically.
“Brooklyn happens to be one of those things that can expand,”== wrote the editors of the new Brooklyn Monthly.
“The more you put into it, the more it will hold.”