Four perspectives from the Brooklyn Bridge

The Freshman

New York City has never been a foreign concept to me, growing up just 45 minutes away. But on my recent adventure to the Brooklyn Bridge, I felt like a complete novice to city life. As two of my friends and I made our way downtown, we found that our iPhone maps hadn’t accounted for service changes. We needed the aid of a friendly MTA worker just to find our way through the subway.

After many transfers, we made it to the bridge where my fear of heights hit me as I saw hundreds of people slowly trudging onto a wood-plank promenade. As we joined the masses, I felt claustrophobic, uncomfortable, and nervous. But then I looked out. The views were absolutely stunning and the atmosphere intoxicating. People laughed, talked, held hands, rode tandem bikes, shot photos, and painted landscapes. All of a sudden, none of the tribulations we went through to get there mattered.

Since I have lived in the area my entire life, I’ve never been to the tourist attractions, but my experience at the bridge was something that almost made me feel like a real New Yorker. New York is not about being from New York—it’s about being in New York. The city is as much for me as it is for the Russian tourist, the mango street vendor, the friendly MTA worker, or the friends I’ve made here who I’ve only known for three weeks but feel like I’ve known forever. NYC is for people who have lived here for 15 years and for people who have lived here for one day, as long as they’re willing to discover it over and over again.

—SOPHIE SOLOMON-O’CONNELL

The Sophomore

After walking halfway across the Manhattan Bridge, I realized my sunset stroll was a bit misled. My boyfriend and I had planned a romantic walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. We’d only seen it in movies and had no idea what it looked like up-close, clearly. We ignored the signs that said “Manhattan Bridge” (assuming the famous BB had multiple names) and confidently pranced along the wrong pedestrian path.

Ten minutes in, we looked to our left and gazed upon those monster arches backed by an incredible Sunday sunset. We wanted that bridge above our heads—not this one.
After another 20 minute detour, we found ourselves finally admiring those larger-than-life suspension cables that create a beautiful grid in front of Manhattan’s extensive skyline.

The concrete mystique that drew me to New York City two years ago captured my heart once again as I walked away from my new home in Brooklyn.

The Brooklyn Bridge wasn’t as overwhelmingly huge as I had pictured. The skyscrapers, even in the sunset distance, towered over the arches. Yet there was something that made me pop out my iPhone camera every few moments.

It’s something more than size. Maybe it was the way the clouds hung purple over the black bridge that evening, or the perfect 63-degree weather, or the hand-holding of nearly every person on that narrow pathway.

There was a force in the Brooklyn Bridge that night that makes me never want to stumble onto another bridge again.

—CYDNEY HEDGPETH

The Junior

Think back to your first time. It’s your first night at college, and you have no idea what goes where. You’ve seen it a billion times in a billion chick flicks but it’s not nearly as clean in real life as it looks on screen. Instead, there’s awkward fumbling in the dark, the beep of your phone dying, stale four-dollar champagne on your underage breath. You walk back with your heels in your hands.

The next morning, over brunch mimosas at a nondescript diner, you tell your friends about it. They aren’t entirely sure how they feel about the whole affair. To be honest, you aren’t either. But, as will become habitual for many Sunday mornings to come, you start romanticizing the memory of the night before—for posterity’s sake. This will make a good story in a couple of years, you tell yourself, and you fill in the details.

But trust me, no matter how good the story of your first is, it’s always better the next time around.

See, the first time I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge was the first night of my freshman year. The second time was this past weekend, and sometime in the last two years, without my noticing it, everything had changed—for the better. The walk, which I remembered as mercilessly long, now seems a comfortable thirty minute stroll. The breeze, which was once biting and made me homesick for Indian summers, is now precisely the perfect temperature. And the Manhattan skyline, which was once entirely composed of unwelcoming and jagged shards and spikes, has somehow, without my noticing, started to look a lot like home.

—REGA JHA

The Senior

As a native New Yorker, I have many memories of the Brooklyn Bridge, and crossing it this Sunday—for the first time in at least five years—brought them all back, especially those of high school and 9/11.

The Brooklyn Book Festival had hipsters out in droves. A stark contrast to the Brooklyn I knew from 2001, when the area was crime-ridden and unthinkable as a weekend destination.

As I made my way to the Tillary-Adams intersection and stepped onto the bridge, I felt a familiar sensation, though. The walkway remains inconvenient for pedestrians and cyclists alike. The bike lane is definitely all New York—a pile-up led to a demonstration of something like city road rage. Reggae blasted from one of the cars, providing the perfect soundtrack for my walk. Various languages—Italian, Chinese, French, and of course, hipster (“No, Wilco is still relevant!”)—surrounded me.

The views from the bridge remain dramatic and dynamic, but I focused on the changes within the last five years, namely DUMBO. One of the first neighborhoods to usher in waves of gentrification that have overwhelmed much of Brooklyn, the area boasts renovated lofts that overlook the bridge. These buildings seem to comment on the ever-changing nature of the city, testifying that certain aspects of Brooklyn’s character would remain even when transformed from the inside.

Looking toward Manhattan, I found a completely new juxtaposition: the Verizon building on the right and Frank Gehry’s masterpiece at 8 Spruce Street on the left. A marvel of technology and construction, with folds that twist around its façade, Gehry’s building conveys an organic modernity that reflects the Brooklyn Bridge itself—a living, breathing vessel that remains essential to New York, and essential to my identity as a New Yorker.

—ANATOLE RAHMAN