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Reviews
| Manhattan Bridge: The Troubled Story of a New York Monument. By Thomas R. Winpenny. Easton, Penn.: Canal History and Technology Press, n.d. [2003]. xviii+112 pp., illus., diags., map, notes, index. $19.95 pb (ISBN 0-930973-29-1).
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Writing the first book on a given subject is a difficult task. Even if there are no competitors racing to press, authors still have the tremendous responsibility of getting facts straight, so as not to have errors debunked—or perpetuated—by later works. For example, David B. Steinman's 1945 work on the Brooklyn Bridge, The Builders of the Bridge, left much to be corrected by David McCullough's more thorough and better-documented research in The Great Bridge (1972). Nevertheless, while McCullough easily outclassed Steinman as a historian, the latter retains his reputation as an engineer admirably capable of communicating with others outside his profession. From their different perspectives, both made important contributions to the large body of literature about this national landmark.
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Compared to its neighbor, the Manhattan Bridge is inferior in terms of span length, durability, and iconic status, which is the greatest challenge confronting Thomas R. Winpenny in writing the premiere treatise about the Manhattan Bridge. His introductory chapter presents a number of convincing arguments about why this "neglected stepchild" (p. 2) deserves scholarly attention, but none of these seems to justify the use of "monument" in the book's subtitle. There is a passing reference to Carrére and Hastings as the architects of the approaches but no mention of their role in the Beaux-Arts decorative program that makes the bridge, if not an architectural landmark, then at least a visual one. While Winpenny provides a lengthy list of flaws, among them questionable engineering, poor maintenance, and political intrigue, explanation of the bridge's survival seems limited to its place in New York City's transportation network.
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The stated purpose of chapter 1 is to provide an overview of the next five chapters, which are then summarized again in chapter 7. The content is bracketed further by a lengthy foreword by Eric DeLony, then chief of the Historic American Engineering Record, and the clumsily titled "Appendix: Science and Technology Interface: Some Insights from Thomas Kuhn, Paul Sibly, and Henry Petroski." DeLony places the Manhattan Bridge solidly in the context of American suspension bridge engineering, but having accomplished this mission in the foreword, Winpenny gives it little attention elsewhere in the book. Likewise, the history of technology context treated in the appendix would have been better integrated into the main text.
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From a technological standpoint, the Manhattan Bridge is most significant for its unprecedented accommodation of light and heavy rail transit (eight tracks in its early days) and being a proving ground for the deflection theory of suspension bridge design. None of the seven instances of "deflection theory" cited in the index completely explains the theory's mathematical underpinning or the hazards of its application without sufficient understanding of aerodynamic behavior, which was implicated in the 1940 Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse. From Winpenny's placement of phrases such as "lateral torsional instability" and "torque tube" in quotations as a substitute for explication, it is apparent that the structural engineers whom he interviewed also spoke in unmitigated jargon. One wishes that they shared Steinman's gift for describing structural engineering concepts in plain language for the non-engineer.
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The bridge's primary design flaw, as Winpenny correctly notes, was the placement of rapid transit tracks on either side of a center roadway that carried lighter weight automobile traffic. This arrangement amplified the asymmetry of a subway train traveling on the bridge's south side without a corresponding weight on the north, which twisted the deck about its longitudinal axis. Twisting imposed high cyclic loads that caused metal fatigue and cracking of steel truss members until the bridge was stiffened during a recently completed, decade-long rehabilitation. An important comparison (unfortunately not one made in this book) is between the Manhattan Bridge and Philadelphia's Ben Franklin Bridge, which also has rapid transit tracks on the outside. Whereas the latter's double-deck roadway and stiffening trusses form a closed box in cross-section, the Manhattan Bridge has only a single deck in the center roadway, resulting in a U-shaped section that is far more susceptible to twisting deformation.
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As the premiere treatise on its subject, this book brings disappointingly few original sources of information to light, especially when compared to Winpenny's groundbreaking Without Fitting, Filing, or Chipping: An Illustrated History of the Phoenix Bridge Company (1996). The relatively few primary source citations in Manhattan Bridge draw heavily from the author's previous research in the Phoenix Bridge Collection at the Hagley Library. The "Note on Sources" (p. 95) does not mention a search—even an unsuccessful one—for records produced by the engineers, contractors, or transit companies that played a role in the Manhattan Bridge's construction. Winpenny includes significant oral history by interviewing engineers involved in the bridge's rehabilitation, but he otherwise seems to have relied on trade publications, newspaper articles, websites, and other secondary sources. Public records from New York's city and state agencies, which one would think essential to placing the bridge in a political and economic context, are not cited anywhere.
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Winpenny has included more than a dozen construction photographs, many of them previously unpublished, stunning in composition and crisply reproduced. Contemporary photographs by Jack Boucher and Tom Flagg also look sharp. Regrettably, none of these was enlarged to fill the book's unusual landscape format, which has been used to greater effect elsewhere (the most extreme example to date being Judith Dupre's [1997] 18-inch-wide Bridges: A History of the World's Most Famous and Important Spans).
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The remaining images in Manhattan Bridge are far less consistent in quality. Historic diagrams and photographs (including two by Berenice Abbott) are either blurry or dark and, adding insult to injury, a muddy photomontage from the Saturday Evening Mail is rotated 90 degrees, with its bottom edge in the gutter on page 34. A map from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey on page 48 is printed with a visible crease and without a north arrow or scale bar. The reader is also left wanting illustrations that explain the causes and solutions of the bridge's structural deficiencies. There is but one cross-section illustrating the ill-fated arrangement of transit tracks (on p. 16, albeit an earlier scheme with heavy rail above streetcars) and no elevation showing the as-built design and its major dimensions.
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The book's readability is further compromised by its layout and editing. Sidebars (such as Gustav Lindenthal's biography on p. 8) are set in the same typeface and point size as the main text they interrupt, separated only by a thin box that does little to avoid confusing the reader. Proofreading is uniformly poor throughout: within the foreword alone, there is disagreement over the wind speed that caused the Tacoma Narrows collapse ("40 mph" on p. xv versus "42 mph" on p. xvi), a misspelling of famed aerodynamicist Theodor von Kármán's name (p. xviii), and the dreaded apostrophe in a plural ("U.S. Army Corps of Engineer's" on p. xi). The rate at which such errors appear seems unusually high, even for a first edition.
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| As in his previous book, Winpenny has set a high standard for placing an engineering artifact in diverse contexts—from politics to labor to technology—usually ignored by traders in the nuts-and-bolts minutiae of American bridge building. It is unfortunate that the difficult transition from scholarly effort to book was not made in partnership with a similarly qualified editor, graphic designer, or proofreader. There is much more to be said about this span and its place in American industrial history, for which Winpenny's pioneering research has produced a useful road map. One only wishes that this book had the production values to match. |
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