|
In his 1981 memoir Sketches from Life, Lewis Mumford,
like Kazin in A Walker in the City, writes of a seminal moment
walking across the Brooklyn Bridge,
Yes: I loved the great bridges and walked back and
forth over them, year after year. But as often happens with
repeated experiences, one memory stands out above all others:
a twilight hour in early springit was March, I thinkwhen,
starting from the Brooklyn end, I faced into the west wind
sweeping over the rivers from New Jersey. The ragged, slate-blue
cumulous clouds that gathered over the horizon left open patches
for the light of the waning sun to shine through, and finally,
as I reached the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, the sunlight
spread across the sky, forming a halo around the jabbed mountain
of skyscrapers, with the darkened loft buildings and warehouses
huddling below in the foreground. The towers, topped by the
golden pinnacles of the new Woolworth Building, still caught
the light even as it began to ebb away. Three quarters of
the way across the Bridge I saw the skyscrapers in the deepening
darkness become slowly honeycombed with lights until, before
I reached the Manhattan end, these buildings piled up in a
dazzling mass against the indigo sky.
Here was my city, immense, overpowering, flooded with energy
and light; there below lay the river and the harbor, catching
the last flakes of gold on their waters, with the black tugs,
free from their barges, plodding dockward, the ferry boats
lumbering from pier to pier, the tramp steamers slowly crawling
toward the sea, the Statue of Liberty erectly standing, little
curls of steam coming out of boat whistles or towered chimneys,
while the rumbling elevated trains and trolley cars just below
me on the bridge moved in a relentless tide to carry tens
of thousands homeward. And there was I, breasting the March
wind, drinking in the city and the sky, both vast, yet both
contained in me, transmitting through me the great mysterious
will that had made them and the promise of the new day that
was still to come.
Back to the main story
|