Most of us have a favorite bridge. That is to say, most everyone has, in his or her mind’s eye, a structure that surpasses all others in the requisite traits: it is technically bold, or admirably simple; it is built on a scale utterly commensurate with its function; it is, in some elemental sense, beautiful. Bridges, after all, are hardly mere methods of conveyance. The best of them don’t only suggest, but somehow embody, the human aspiration to connect — with other people, other places, even (at the risk of sounding sci-fi all of a sudden) with our own future selves.
A bridge is an idea before it is a thing, and if the idea is coherent enough, and strong enough, the structure that grows from that idea will last.
The gorgeous Golden Gate. The dreamlike Ponte dei Sospiri. London’s Tower Bridge. Any one of countless covered, timber-built gems across the U.S. and Canada. The George Washington arcing over the Hudson (which Le Corbusier once praised as “the most beautiful bridge in the world … blessed … the only seat of grace in the disordered city”). The world is filled with beautiful bridges — the big and the small, the famous and the largely unknown — and each and every one of them started as an idea before ending up as something meaningful. Maybe one was the site of a marriage proposal, maybe another marked the hugely emotional, deeply satisfying end of a once-in-lifetime road trip. The reasons why people love certain bridges are as varied as the styles, sizes and construction materials of the edifices themselves.
And then there’s the Brooklyn Bridge.
Ever since it opened 130 years ago, the limestone, granite and steel neo-Gothic marvel connecting “the borough of churches” and Lower Manhattan has managed to humble and inspire those lucky enough to see it in real life, and especially those lucky enough to stroll (once, as a tourist, or every day, as a commuter) across its surprisingly companionable walkway. The bridge’s astonishing interplay between the ancient (the Gothic arches paired in each of the two towers) and the absolutely contemporary (the protean Manhattan skyline, the commercial bustle of New York Harbor and the river below) imparts a rare and thrilling vibe to the whole: it’s possible to imagine that the structure has been there, anchoring the two sides of the river, not for a little more than a century but for millennia.
[More: See the LIFE gallery, "Lower Manhattan: Where New York Was Born."]
More remarkably, the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge has somehow managed to remain ideal amid its ever-changing surroundings. When it was first built, its towers — rising 270 feet above the water — were the tallest manmade structures North America, and the bridge’s colossal size spoke to America’s near-lunatic energy and its Manifest Destiny-driven push westward to new lands, new challenges, new resources, new everything. Today, surrounded by architecture and technology that was literally inconceivable when it first opened, the Brooklyn Bridge still looks and feels like a structure that was built with eternity in mind. New York has grown enormously larger, while the borough of Brooklyn itself, if it was a city unto itself, would be the fourth largest in the United States — but the Brooklyn Bridge does not feel smaller, or less significant in the face of the utter transformation of the environment that surrounds it. In fact, in some respects, it feels more monumental than it ever has.
[MORE: See the LIFE gallery, "Love Letter to New York: Classic LIFE Photos of the Big Apple."
Finally, the bridge's enduring power as an engineering wonder and as a breathtaking work of art both derive from its designer's singular vision. The genius behind the bridge, John Augustus Roebling (1806 – 1869), was a civil engineer who also happened to be blessed with something we rarely associate with practitioners of the utilitarian arts: namely, a sense of the sublime. How else explain the marvelous — one might even say playful — balance between the mighty stonework towers and the delicate but immeasurably strong spiderweb cables that support the mile-long span? How else explain Roebling's unexpected and, all these years later, still-thrilling choice to carve graceful Gothic arches into the towers, lending a nobility and at the same time an airiness to the bridge's silhouette that no other shape could possibly convey.
[MORE: See all of TIME.com's architecture coverage.]
Here, on the anniversary of the January day in 1870 that its construction officially began, LIFE.com offers a celebration of the Brooklyn Bridge through the lens of LIFE’s Andreas Feininger. Trained as an architect (he worked for a year with Le Corbusier), Feininger made some of the most striking, incisive portraits of things — ships, buildings, animal bones, highways — ever crafted by any photographer. His portraits of the Brooklyn Bridge, meanwhile — and he made many, in all sorts of weather, at all times of day and night — his portraits of the bridge suggest that even for someone as accomplished and as well-traveled as Feininger, something in that structure lit a special creative spark in the former architect.
Most of us have a favorite bridge. And then there’s that neo-Gothic marvel across the East River. Long may it stand.
— Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com
