They Looked at All That Water and Thought BIG.
Getting off the boat, an old sailing ship at the jetty immediately caught our eye.
It looked wonderfully out of place among the buildings of modern New York. As though a little piece of another era had been left behind.
And then came something my wife had been looking forward to:
pretzels. 😄
She had been saying she wanted to try a real American pretzel, and there it was. A pretzel truck waiting for us.
Somewhere between the old ship and the pretzels, New York was already beginning to tell us something about itself.
Old and new seem perfectly comfortable together.
A little restaurant nearby made the point rather nicely. Almost quaint beneath the enormous buildings around it.
And then the scale changed completely.
The Brooklyn Bridge.
Completed in 1883.
I looked at its massive stone towers, the intricate cables and all that blue-grey steel stretching across the river.
And, as a first-time visitor, I had the obvious question:
Who looked at all that water and thought, “Let’s build a bridge”? 😄
Not just a bridge.
This bridge.
And they did it more than 140 years ago.
We drove across it, while I did my bit for the expedition by looking around in amazement. 😄
Then came the Manhattan Bridge, completed in 1909.
Another enormous structure.
Another century of history.
And suddenly, I wasn’t just looking at bridges.
I was looking at vision.
People who could stand beside a river, imagine something that wasn’t there, and then actually build it.
Perhaps that’s what humbled me most.
They looked at all that water and thought BIG.
And more than a century later, their big idea is still carrying people across.
Some bridges connect places.
The really remarkable ones connect us to the people who dared to imagine them.
