: The bridge is among our most ancient technologies. The moment some distant ancestor thought to place a log where he (or she) wanted to cross the stream, and not where the logs happen to have fallen, the bridge was born.
A bridge inspires us. A bridge overcomes an obstacle and connects someplace to someplace else, with strength and often with grace and beauty. A bridge lets us go to the other side.
The spiritual connection is old. The high priest of ancient Rome carried the title of Chief Bridgemaker, or Pontifex Maximus. The head of the Roman Catholic Church still carries that Latin title, pontiff or pope in English.
The bridge can give reassurance to lovers holding hands, hope to the thwarted and consolation to the broken-hearted. The bridge connects, physically. It unites the divided. It makes one of what had been two.
The world has millions of bridges. To say Happy Birthday to the Golden Gate Bridge, we share with you a dozen of our other favorites.
Left:
Really Old: Ponte Vecchio It's in the nature of bridges that they draw traffic, and it's in the nature of real estate (especially commercial real estate) that value is based on location, location, location. "You want to cross the river, you're going to have to see my goods." Thus, people built shops (with homes above) on many medieval bridges. The old London Bridge of nursery-song fame is one such and Venice's Rialto another.
The Ponte Vecchio (Old Bridge) across the River Arno in Florence, Italy, dates back to Roman times, but the current bridge (so to speak) dates back to 1345 (by Taddeo Gaddi), with the long upper gallery added by the great Renaissance architect Giorgio Vasari in 1564. It is probably the oldest segmental-arch (that is, the arches are not the full semicircles of Roman design) bridge in Europe. It is certainly among the most romantic.
Photo: DuccioBartolozzi/Flickr
: Be not deceived by its Gothic design. This iconic London landmark was designed in 1884 and built from 1886 to 1894. Architects Horace Jones and John Wolfe Barry solved the problem of access for ship traffic on the Thames with two gigantic hydraulic bascules, or drawbridge spans. The side spans are suspension design. The high-level walkways were designed to allow pedestrians to cross even when the bascules were up.
There's a story that the buyer of the old London Bridge thought he was buying this one to move to Arizona, but it's apparently just a story. Both buyer and seller have denied it.
Photo: Christopher Chan/Flickr
: The asymmetrical main pylon of Erasmus Bridge inspires Rotterdam residents to call it the Swan. Like other cable-stayed bridges, the 1996 structure also evokes a harp or lyre. Architect Ben van Berkel's design crosses the River Maas. Sidewalks, bicycle lanes, streetcar rails and vehicle lanes connect the old city with new development to the south. It's 456 feet high and 2,631 feet long, including a 292-foot bascule that allows large ships to pass beneath.
Photo: Blond Avenger/Flickr
: The Gateshead Millennium pedestrian and bicycle bridge crosses the River Tyne between Newcastle and Gateshead in northern England. It's both a cable-stayed bridge and a drawbridge. Completed in 2000, the unique design by Wilkinson Eyre Architects (with Gifford & Partners engineering) rotates on its longitudinal axis (counterclockwise in this view). The arched upper span tilts downward (about 45 degrees) as the curved pathway tilts up, so that both are high enough above the water to allow boats to pass beneath. Locals compare it to a winking eye. It stands just downstream from a series of historic low- and high-level road and rail bridges.
Photo: Pickersgill Reef/Flickr
: When I first saw pictures of the Forth Bridge, I thought it ungainly, even ugly. After learning its history and seeing it in person, I realized I was wrong. The 1890 rail bridge across the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh is strikingly beautiful, its muscular cantilever structure robustly suited to its task and its time.
Designed by John Fowler and Benjamin Baker, its three 330-foot towers carry two clear spans of 1,710 feet each. The main structure is 5,350 feet long, not counting the approaches, and the bridge still carries up to 200 trains a day, connecting Edinburgh to the north of Scotland.
Photo: Simon Bradshaw/Flickr
: What fun! It may look like an amusement-park ride, but the Magdeburg Water Bridge carries a canal on a 748-foot span across the River Elbe in eastern Germany. Originally conceived in 1919, it finally opened in 2003. It connects the Elbe-Havel Canal to the important Mittelland Canal, linking Berlin to the Rhine-Ruhr industrial heartland. The main span directly above the river is 348 feet long.
Photo: Chris Lori/Flickr
: The Millau Viaduct carries the A75 motorway across the valley of the river Tarn in southern France, allowing a major north-south route to bypass a tangle of mountain roads. Designed by Norman Foster and completed in 2004, it's the world's longest cable-stayed bridge, at 8,660 feet, and the world's tallest, at 1,125 feet. It's taller in fact than the Eiffel Tower, which remarkably was built by the same firm.
Photo: chericbaker/Flickr
: Kintaikyo (Kintai bridge) near Iwakuni City was first built in 1673. It washed away in a flood the next year. Its replacement lasted until a typhoon destroyed it in 1950. The new bridge was built in 1953. The five graceful arches each span 131 feet for a total length of 656 feet across the Nishiki River. Because of its beauty, the bridge got its name from kintai, or gold brocade sash.
Photo: kamoda/Flickr
: The Akashi Kaikyo Bridge, the world's longest and tallest suspension bridge, links the city of Kobe with Awaji-shima Island, as part of the highway connecting the Japanese islands of Honshu and Shikoku. Completed in 1998, it stretches 12,828 feet across the stormy Akashi Strait. The center span is 6,527 feet, more than half again as long as the Golden Gate Bridge. The towers are 928 feet high.
Photo: kamoda/Flickr
: The Oresund Bridge carries rail and road traffic between Copenhagen, Denmark, and Malmö, Sweden. The bridge-tunnel combo is the longest border-crossing structure in the world. Completed in 2000, the 10-mile length includes an artificial peninsula at the Danish end, a 2.2-mile tunnel, a 2.5-mile artificial island and a 4.9-mile cable-stayed bridge. The toll for a passenger car is about $50.
Photo: Lauri Väin/Flickr
: That's Asia on the right and Europe on the left -- with Istanbul's Ortaköy Mosque. The suspension bridge links the ancient city with its Asian suburbs. Completed in 1974, the Bosporus Bridge is just short of a mile long end-to-end, with a center span of 3,524 feet. Venus Williams played an exhibition tennis game on the bridge deck in 2005, with the volleys crossing from one continent to the other.
Photo: pictalogue/Flickr
: Australia's Sydney Harbor Bridge doesn't link continents, but symbolizes one. Its 1,650-foot steel-arch span used to be the world's largest, but Chinese bridges now surpass it. Completed in 1932, the Sydney Harbor Bridge connects Australia's biggest city with its northern suburbs, carrying rail, vehicle and pedestrian traffic. It used to get called the Coathanger a lot, but that name seems to be fading. Perhaps, like the Parisians with their at-first-reviled Eiffel Tower, the Aussies are getting used to it at last.
Photo: semuthutan/Flickr
: John A. Roebling's masterpiece, the Brooklyn Bridge, killed him in a construction accident in 1869, soon after work began. The composite of suspension and cable-stayed design (hence its trademark criss-cross cables) enabled a bridge 50 percent longer than any other suspension bridge when it was completed in 1883. It pioneered bridge-construction technology both with pneumatic caissons below the water and steel cables in the air.
The bridge celebrated its 125th birthday last Saturday, but from its beginning has inspired artists and writers. Edward Steichen and Walker Evans photographed it. Georgia O'Keefe painted it. Hart Crane praised it: "O harp and altar." Jack Kerouac had his "Brooklyn Bridge Blues" there.
Poet Marianne Moore sang of it:
way out; way in; romantic passageway
first seen by the eye of the mind,
then by the eye. O steel! O stone!
Climactic ornament, a double rainbow
The Brooklyn Bridge inspired politicians, too. So firmly did the bridge link the separate cities of New York and Brooklyn, they merged in 1898 to form Greater New York.
The bridge is what we see in it. It is what we wish it to be. And it's also still a workaday way to get from the Lower East Side to Brooklyn Heights.
Photo: ehpien/Flickr