A Trip Across the Brooklyn Bridge to Brighton Beach
On Sunday we planned to visit park attractions that didn’t need tickets, lines, or queues in the hopes of avoiding any potential crowds. The Brooklyn Bridge should have fit that criteria, but it was in fact rather busy. I didn’t expect it to be nearly as crowded as it was, or that the Manhattan side would have so many stalls selling tourist souvenirs and food. Clearly a lot of tourists come to walk across the iconic bridge, but at least it was free and not too busy.
We joined the throngs of people taking memorable photos of the cables and towers and recreating the photographs sold at the tourist stalls.
I’ve seen a few documentaries on the bridge’s construction, but I didn’t remember it being both a suspension bridge and a cable-stayed bridge. According to Wikipedia, the original engineer designed the bridge as a suspension bridge that was to be 6 times stronger than he thought it needed to be. During construction, it was discovered that inferior steel was used in part of the cables, but it was too late to replace it. The engineer determined that the bridge was still 4 times stronger than it needed to be, so the inferior steel was left in and diagonal cabling from the towers (cable-stays) were added to stiffen the bridge. Though unnecessary, the cable-stays were left for their distinctive beauty. This also explains why the bridge is still operational. Being so extremely over-designed, it can accommodate heavier vehicles and last longer than other bridges built around the same time (1870).
New York is split into 5 boroughs: Manhattan, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. The aptly named Brooklyn Bridge was the first land crossing from Manhattan to Brooklyn, which is the most populous borough (with over 2.6 million people). After we walked the 1.6km bridge, we went down to DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass) on the Brooklyn side and got some really cool photos of the Manhattan Bridge, which is just upriver of the Brooklyn Bridge. The bridge towers over the buildings in the area and makes for a striking photograph.
The area also has a park named the Brooklyn Bridge Park. We took a stroll here and sat on the boardwalk tables beside the river to snack. For such a huge city, I am impressed by the amount of green space in NYC. Vancouver likes to brag about its greenery but it’s actually all in the mountains, in sight of the city but unreachable, whereas NYC has parks and public plazas distributed throughout urban areas. Additionally, these spaces are wide and easily accommodate pedestrians, unlike the narrow sidewalks and seawalls of Vancouver.
Walking further into Brooklyn, we crossed a wooden pedestrian truss bridge up to Brooklyn Heights. This area is even nicer than Harlem with its attractive buildings. Unfortunately, we didn’t walk around much and only went through a small part of town to get to the subway so that we could ride it to Brighton Beach.
Brighton Beach is at the southern end of Brooklyn and very close to the Atlantic Ocean. It is well-known for having a sandy beach, an amusement park, as well as the New York Aquarium. Yuki was excited about the roller coasters but we didn’t go into the amusement park. Instead, on this windy spring day we walked up the extra wide boardwalk beside the beach.
We came here solely to walk the boardwalk, as it is in one of our favourite TV shows: Person of Interest. Though it wasn’t sunset or summertime as it was in the show, we were still pretty excited to be there and take some photos.
