Roebling Suspension Bridge--Cincinnati, OH

So everyone knows the Brooklyn Bridge, and how it was designed by John A Roebling. But where did Roebling get the experience to win such a bid? Well, in Cincinnati. Among other places.

One of the spiffy things about Cincinnati's location is how it's directly across the river from a river. This puts the Queen City at a wonderful cross roads--traffic up the Ohio, down the Ohio, from the interior of Kentucky, the interior of Ohio. Cincinnati was briefly considered as a replacement national capital after the British sacked DC during the War of 1812, and the fact it was smack-dab in the middle of all these key waterways (while still being out of range of Royal Marine expeditionary forces) was a big reason.

But all that river traffic was even worse than the current trainwreck that I-75 becomes two-to-four times a day now. Have you seen the steamboats of the mid 1800's? We're not talking a Honda Civic--we're talking a four story building on it's side, getting in the way of everything else that may want to cross the river. That made traffic between Ohio and Kentucky difficult--sure, you could ferry goods and people, but it just added to the congestion in a major way. Not to mention you couldn't always depend on the river to be high enough, or low enough, you needed a place to land those ferries...there are reasons we build bridges, people.

So starting in 1846 (I'm pulling these dates and names from Wikipedia, for the record--as much as I love history I suck at memorizing the details), the Covington and Cincinnati Bridge Company incorporated and called up John Roebling, who'd already designed and supervised the construction of several impressive spans around the country. It wasn't until 1856 that construction actually began--everything from lobbying against the bridge by the ferry operators to slow funding kept things at a glacial pace. Construction kept up at the same rate--between weather, funding, and health issues of key members of the Bridge Company work only took place during maybe a year and a half out of these 4 years.

The Civil War hit, halting construction. However, during the course of building defenses the Union Army built a pontoon bridge across the Ohio--proving to the community that a bridge might be a pretty good idea, after all. This solved the funding problems, and besides an invasion scare construction resumed in 1863. By 1866 the bridge was completed, paving the way for other spans across the Ohio River (see my banner photo).