Ralph Gardner Jr. takes his first stroll above the East River span
Clik here to view.
Easter afternoon I did something, not necessarily holiday-related, that every New Yorker should try. I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge for the first time.
There’s no excuse for the delay. But I’ll attempt one anyway.
Growing up in Manhattan, at least when I was growing up in Manhattan, the Earth may as well have been flat. Stray any further than the East River, probably infested with sea monsters, and you very well might fall off the edge.
And Brooklyn was part of what lay beyond.
But as we drove across it Sunday morning on our way to pick up our daughter Lucy in Brooklyn, the crowds crossing the bridge were astonishing.
When did the Brooklyn Bridge get so popular? And why?
Brooklyn’s heightened hipness obviously has something to do with it. And the 19th century bridge’s history and majesty. Also the excellent views of lower Manhattan and New York Harbor. But still.
Maybe it’s because the almost 60 million tourists projected to visit this year expect great cities to have important crossings—the Pont Neuf in Paris, the Westminster Bridge over the Thames—and feel their trip would be incomplete without one.
The holiday seemed the right time to join them. And Lucy, who estimates she’s crossed the Brooklyn Bridge a couple of dozen times and has been lobbying me to join her, agreed to walk off Easter lunch with me.
As we approached from the Brooklyn side we passed tourists of every stripe, including a large group in matching blue “NYC 2016” windbreakers. Clearly, this was an attraction on a scale with the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.
And the weather wasn’t even that great—chilly and gloomy—though, as we joined the throng it became clear that the most unpredictable element wasn’t the breeze, which was subdued, but the bicyclists we were forced to share the combination walkway/bikeway with.
“One of the typical experiences is getting screamed at and almost killed by bicyclists going too fast,” Lucy warned me.
I can understand why. While a white line divides the pedestrian and bicycle sides of the path, in some places it’s only a few feet wide and it’s almost impossible for pedestrians to avoid straying into the bike lane.
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Especially if they’re distracted by the view and their efforts to use it as a backdrop for photographs; it goes without saying that it’s hard to simultaneously take a selfie and dodge a cyclist bearing down on you.
“One night I was walking back to Manhattan and took a picture of the sunset,” recalled my daughter, one of the few who seemed at that moment to be observing the pedestrian/bicyclist divide. “I posted it on Facebook and some [expletive] I went to college with commented, ‘You shouldn’t block the bike lane.’”
Others who straddled that boundary line—indeed seemed to use it as a design element—were Ryan and Lisa McDaniel. They were marking what looked like their nuptials (she in what may have been a wedding dress, he in a dress shirt and suspenders) by posing for a photographer.
But apparently the ceremony had occurred on a previous occasion. They told me that they were departing New York for Texas after working for over three years for the Watchtower, the Jehovah’s Witnesses world headquarters in the shadow of the bridge, and wanted to commemorate the occasion.
“We wanted a photo shoot as a memory,” Ms. McDaniel explained.
As we crossed from the Brooklyn to the Manhattan side of the bridge—though I missed the “Leaving Brooklyn” sign, if one exists—my daughter offered me another possible explanation for the bridge’s popularity; along the way we passed locks and even headphones attached to the railings, apparently signs of devotion, such as those as on Paris’s groaning Pont des Arts.
Clik here to view.
ENLARGE“A lot of people not from New York City, their relationship with the Brooklyn Bridge has to do with the ‘Sex and the City’ movie,” Lucy said.
Unfortunately I missed it. But apparently Miranda and Steve have a moving reunion on the bridge.
The span didn’t breathe romance to me. The East River seems a more broad-shouldered stream than the Seine. And the trash cans on the bridge were overflowing at the end of a holiday weekend. Then again, I’m not seeing it through a millennial’s rose-colored glasses.
However, Lucy agreed with my assessment. “No, it’s not relaxing by any means,” she said, since the walkway straddles vehicular traffic passing in both directions.
“Have you ever done the Manhattan Bridge?” she asked.
Compared with the Brooklyn Bridge it’s supposedly almost meditative, if you manage to ignore the subway.
Write to Ralph Gardner Jr. at ralph.gardner@wsj.com