DB: It seems out of character for Ammann to have taken on the role of entrepreneur selling his bridge, but that's in character for the greatest engineers. Roebling was, of course, an entrepreneur in getting the Brooklyn Bridge. He worked with the politicians. He worked with the civic leaders. Lindenthal was also an entrepreneur in trying to get his great projects accepted and built. And so this carries through. It's just that the profession and the general public had this image of engineering as a kind of a dry subject, purely technologically oriented, not realizing the emotional charge that is necessary for these great works to come into being. So it is, it is consistent with past engineers who have been successful in this kind of work. There are plenty of engineers who are successful in doing other things, but in succeeding in getting these major works, these major innovations through, they really must turn to this kind of activity.

DB: The Port Authority, at just this time, had come to the conclusion in 1924 and '25 that it couldn't solve the railroad problem which had been, which it had been constituted to solve. And, therefore, here was an institution looking for a mission, so it was a question, in a way, of survival. And since no institution likes to declare itself dead, the, they were receptive to some kinds of new ideas. And the bridge itself, therefore, symbolized for them new life, new activity, and one which, of course, was, to most people then, clearly on the horizon. Even though they couldn't predict how strongly it would change the culture, nonetheless, they could see that it was coming. And, of course, the tunnel was under construction, the Hudson tunnel, by this time and there were terrific problems of traffic. And so it was clear that something like this would be not clear, perhaps, it was taken by the Port Authority to be a new direction for them and Ammann, therefore, was the right person at the right time with the right thing.

DB: "The search for symbols" is perhaps, is perhaps a confusing term. For example, John Roebling clearly identified Brooklyn Bridge as a symbol. That was, in a way, part of his sales pitch for the Brooklyn Bridge, as it had been for the Cincinnati Bridge. And he saw this and Ammann did, too, but Ammann was not working in the same way as John Roebling. Ammann was working more quietly. And in the articles he wrote, particularly those in the early '20s, he is portraying this new bridge as a symbol of the society. He never says it quite as explicitly as Roebling did, but, of course, he had a copy of Roebling's report. We know that. We have a signed version of it in our own archive. And this, it's clear that this was the model for Ammann, not just the Brooklyn Bridge as you see it, but the very way in which the Brooklyn Bridge got accepted. So that he was conscious of this as being potentially a great new symbol. On the other hand, the use of the word "symbol" can be confusing because a symbol is not some fixed kind of a thing really. It changes over time as people begin to see with new experiences what this thing really represents. So that there is a, a lag and then people begin to realize what this really was. Just as there was a lag from the 1880s, to the 1920s in seeing the Brooklyn Bridge in its full meaning, so there is a lag, and, indeed, the engagement of historians now, right now, in thinking about the past leads directly to these kinds of objects. There's a lot of writing today about the automobile and what it has done to transform America. And apart from the superficial obviousness of that there's the deeper issue of how it really came into being and what the automobile really does mean for individual people. And it's that sort of thing which is, in a way, yet to be done really fully for the George Washington Bridge and for those bridges that represent the 20th century dominance of New York from that to the Verrazano Bridge, in other words, Ammann's opus.

DB: The great appeal of the Brooklyn Bridge in the '20s came about when cultural figures, like Lewis Mumford, Joseph Stella, the painter, Hart Crane, the poet, were in a group of thinkers and artists searching for a usable past. One of their principle documents that rose at this time was The Wasteland by T. S. Elliott, The Wasteland, which essentially said that America was a wasteland. It was a negative view of the modern world, a view that there was nothing, there were no, nothing but hollow men and the whole thing would end with, as you remember, a bang and a whimper. It was in this context that Hart Crane began his poem The Brooklyn Bridge. And he began it on a very positive and optimistic note that by finding in the past this great symbol, it would, therefore, become a standard or inspiration for the future of building. He wrote about things like this. Later on he wrote things that seemed to be contradictory to it, but one must, of course, always remember that when you're reading what an artist says about what artists say about their own work, that's very, very suspect and what impels them to write, in a way almost as much as what impels a bridge designer like Ammann to design is something that's so highly personal and so emotional it can't be ripped out of the context of the work itself.

DB: So it's much better to look at the work than the contradictory statements that somebody like Crane would make about his own work. And the work is clearly a work of great cultural significance. It is, first of all, very beautiful. Second of all, exceptionally ambiguous, just as Crane's own discussion of it was, but, thirdly, it's got the bridge always there, connected with such beautiful lyrical poetry that it is impossible to separate. What does that mean for the future? Well, it means, first of all, in a concrete sense the Brooklyn Bridge was the model. It did serve people as a standard. It served Ammann clearly. He wrote about it. He actually designed the George Washington Bridge with the Brooklyn Bridge in mind. There isn't any doubt but what it served him as a model, as Crane perceived in one of his early statements about it. And Crane's own poetry itself has provided anyone who wants to study with the bridge. I don't know of anybody who's written about Brooklyn Bridge seriously who can avoid Hart Crane. And the very fact that you can't write about a bridge without invoking a poet says something about both of 'em that is so deeply cultural that it means that the goal for the future or the image or the vision of the future is just that kind of connection. Are we building things that have that poetic possibility? And if we aren't, then we had better go back and read Hart Crane and read the articles of Ammann and read what Roebling said and then go back to the beginning of all that, Thomas Telford, who was the first one to say, clearly and loudly, in the Edinburgh Encyclopedia of 1812, "These are works of art. Design them with that in mind." And so Telford has become, and is in fact, our Johann Sebastian Bach, you know, creating a cantata a week. He created a bridge a week, 1,200 bridges of some, in his lifetime. And it's that sense that these were built to outlast us, these were built to change the environment, these were built to allow utility, yes, but also to inspire. And in that sense, I think Crane got the message, and it is a positive message, even though in his own life and even though in the poem there are all those ambiguities which we know exist, anyway, in life. Dangerous to ask me about a poet.

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