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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC, and happy 140th birthday to the Brooklyn Bridge. It opened that many years ago today, May 24th, 1883. A mere 42 years ago, filmmaker Ken Burns first made his mark with his documentary about the bridge. He has just released, this morning, a new 10-minute short of himself and New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman walking across the bridge and discussing the bridge together. They also ate at the River Café, just below the bridge as Ken looks up with reverence.

Ken Burns: This is one of my favorite spots on earth. I remember David McCullough said in our film that it was like standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon, and I think there are people who go, "Huh, what? Brooklyn Bridge?" Yet, when you think that those two towers were the tallest, manmade objects in all of North America, that what it must have been like to live in a Manhattan and a Brooklyn of nothing more than four or five stories, to suddenly having this thing soaring above you.

Brian Lehrer: That little excerpt from the new Ken Burns short about walking the bridge with Michael Kimmelman, which you can see on Ken Burn's PBS page called UNUM or on James Barron's New York Times newsletter called New York Today. With me now are documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and Michael Kimmelman, architecture critic for the New York Times, and author of the book that came out last year, The Intimate City: Walking New York. Ken and Michael, what a treat to have you on together. Welcome back, both of you to WNYC.

Ken Burns: Thank you, Brian.

Michael Kimmelman: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Ken, [crosstalk] just in that little clip I pulled of you looking up from the River Cafe, I learned something. The Brooklyn Bridge arches were once the tallest things in New York City?

Ken Burns: In North America, manmade objects in North America. You just can imagine what it must have been like to have seagulls fly beneath your feet, big, tall mastered ships walking under you. This is a bridge unlike any other bridge on earth that privileges the walker. It's elevated.

It's still wood slats. It's a kind of wonderful New York thoroughfare, a public space between these gothic towers and compression, the granite of that, and the steel, this new metal that the Civil War had just promoted the use of, intention in the beautiful spider web-like design that made it sturdier, but also made it not just this practical utilitarian invention, but a work of art, one of the most important American works of art in the 19th century, as well as-- I don't think there's an argument, the greatest engineering feat in America in the 19th century. Lots to celebrate today on its 140th birthday.

Brian Lehrer: Michael, Ken just mentioned the walkers. If the Brooklyn Bridge opened 140 years ago today. That was before there were even cars and before Brooklyn was even part of New York City. What was the traffic like and the bridge used for originally?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes. Actually, that's funny. You're absolutely right, the first carriage was driven across it, horse-drawn carriage, by Emily Roebling as Ken pointed out in the original film carrying, what was it, Ken again? A rooster.

Ken Burns: A rooster, which was a symbol of victory. She had taken over when her husband was stricken with the bands and confined to his Brooklyn Heights bedroom and watching the [crosstalk]--

Brian Lehrer: That's the architect of the bridge, John Roebling, right?

Ken Burns: John Roebling, the architect died in the first months of construction. His foot was crushed accidentally by a ferry coming in as they were surveying, and his young son, Washington Roebling, 32 years old, took over. When he was incapacitated by the Bens, his [unintelligible 00:04:14] Victorian wife, Emily Roebling, took over and became his eyes and ears and good right arm, and was able to convey his wishes to the bridge.

It's funny you brought up Brooklyn wasn't part of New York. The bridge makes it part of New York, and what Whitman said, "Lo, soul, seest thou not God's purpose from the first the earth be spanned, connected by networks, the lands be welded together."

In fact, it is the fact that there is a now perfect way and a beautiful way to get between these two cities. One is a bedroom community, a city of churches, Brooklyn, to the center of commerce and manufacturing in all of the United States, Manhattan. It's going to essentially prompt the welding of the lands together into the five boroughs.

Brian Lehrer: I want to play for our listeners, the one clip in this 10-minute short that isn't of you two talking.

Ken Burns: [laughs] I like it.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about a guest star. It's the playwright Arthur Miller making this comparison with a bridge that I guess was already there.

Arthur Miller: They could have built another Manhattan Bridge, couldn't they? He didn't. He really aspired to do something gorgeous. It makes you feel that maybe you too could add something that would last and be beautiful.

Brian Lehrer: Ken, I hate to ask you to correct the historical memory of Arthur Miller, but actually, which came first, the Manhattan Bridge or the Brooklyn?

Ken Burns: Oh, the Brooklyn Bridge by far, by far. What he's talking about is in a timeless sense, that there was a kind of not just utilitarianism, there's a kind of boring aspect to the Manhattan Bridge. It doesn't have the kind of poetic beauty that it does. Look, any bridge is something, a log across a stream gets my heart basically, just the excitement of it, the little boy in me.

What he's doing, he's challenging us, and he says to us at the beginning, it's the only interview I've ever conducted in which I used every single bit of it. It was like 40 seconds. He says, "You see, the city as fundamentally a practical utilitarian invention, and suddenly you see this steel poetry standing there."

It's a wonderful thing that he's relating this public work, this civic engagement that has an artistic side to it, and then also maybe something larger for you intimately that it might prompt you to add something that would last and be beautiful. That's the last word of my film. I felt like the young and idealistic Charles Foster Kane nailing up his precepts to Joseph Cotton as he first gets into the newspaper business before he is corrupted, that this is our obligation as human beings in some way. Maybe it's a garden. Maybe it's a child raised with love. Maybe it's a symphony. Maybe it's a cure for a disease. Maybe it's a bridge.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, if you're just joining us, we have a few more minutes with the filmmaker Ken Burns and New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman. There's a new Ken Burn short out today, about 10 minutes long, featuring the two of them, mostly walking across the Brooklyn Bridge to observe what today is. It's the 140th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Michael, I think it was you who said in the film that there was something about the architect Roebling that was like the bridge. What did you mean by that?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes, I mean, John Roebling wasn't a remarkable character, a towering figure in the history of engineering. He was German. He came to the United States partly as a religious dream. He came and settled in Pennsylvania into a kind of utopian village. Did not see that as his future, saw his future in both business. He invented the steel cables, and also in sort of changing the nature of engineering. You see those aspects in the bridge too, that there's this aspirational quality to the bridge, the dream of an America that's something really great and uplifting.

The idea, as Ken said earlier, that he wasn't just building something that spanned the water, but these great gothic towers are quite literal references to the gothic cathedrals that are the most enduring works of architecture and really engineering we've ever built. The scale of it, the sense of monumentality and the eternal nature of the gothic towers in harmony, as Ken said, with these advances in engineering, this was an enormous feat, this great span of the bridge.

The beauty of the bridge is also that it works on all of these different levels together. It is both this image of the unification of New York, of something raised above the city and to which we aspire. When you're walking across it the beauty of the bridge is you feel those steel slats on the pedestrian walkway. They're soft and tangible.

The ways in which the stays and cables interact is very much about engineering, but it creates like the letting of stained-glass when you walk past it and look through that. It's in harmony, even with the gothic towers. There's something so exquisite and finished about the bridge. I think that's what Miller was getting out too. The bridge is something we dream of. It's something that symbolizes New York as a place of dreams.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and that symbolizes New York. Ken, again, lingering on that Arthur Miller quote for just another minute, his line that the bridge made other people think they could do something great too. That is so New York, right?

Ken Burns: So New York, and that's exactly right. We can't imagine that is how the film ends. How it begins is in a similar thing, the Harper's Weekly, which was the leading illustrated magazine of the time on the 24th, or thereabouts of 1883 when the bridge opened, it says, "It so happens," and this is how we start the film, "It so happens that the work which is likely to be our most durable monument, and to convey some knowledge of us to the most remote posterity is a work of bear utility, not a shrine, not a fortress, not a palace, but a bridge. This is a new democratic paradigm. We are not subservient to some monarch. We are not in a war-like posture. We are not subscribing to one religion. We are going to find our catechism in civic works, in civic ideals, and in what that suggests about democratic unity."

Of course, the history of New York is the ebbing and flowing of all of those energies, the dissipation of that, and the sad times. The bridge is always there to offer, as Lewis Mumford told us that he experienced as a young man in the 1920s, a kind of transcendental experience that Hart Crane wrote about in a magnificent poem that Walker Evans photographed that we have as kind of this, not just for New York, but I think for the whole country, this extraordinary biographical drama of how it got made, and then overlying.

This is not simpler times, "Boss Tweed" has got his hands in it. There's wire fraud and all sorts of intrigues and the death of people from caisson's disease, which is what we call the bands. All the drama of it is there, and yet, at the heart, the residue that still remains in those stained glass panels ever-shifting that Michael is talking about, to me in some ways it looks like music and staff and writing and the seagulls become the notes that play the tunes, the music of the bridge, not just the hum, the thrum of the traffic below, but the music of it has the possibility to work on us in a way that hopefully we're conscious of, but maybe not.

I walk the bridge almost every day that I'm in New York, and I have now people that I recognize and see and they nod. There's that kind of community that you get in a small town that I actually do live in there on the bridge in our public space.

Brian Lehrer: Yes. Let's finish as we start to run out of time on this idea of walking the bridge, which the two of you talk about so beautifully in the 10-minute short. We'll let the listeners go to it and see most of that for themselves. Michael, I've had the great pleasure of walking across the Brooklyn Bridge, bicycling across the Brooklyn Bridge, running it in some big group 5k races, which is so exhilarating with that community and the views in both directions.

For you as an architecture critic, it also occurs to me that there are of course, other bridges around here that you can walk or ride, but I'm disappointed in both the Tappan Zee or Mario Cuomo Bridge renovation and what they're doing with the George Washington because bikes and pedestrians have to share these pretty narrow side lanes where you have to be aware so riders don't crash into walkers. The Brooklyn Bridge is just so special for that centering of the people. Can you talk about that as we finish up?

Michael Kimmelman: Yes. Well, you nailed it, Brian. This is exactly right. From the very beginning, Roebling put the pedestrian walkers not just at the center, but over the other traffic, which was in the beginning everything from cattle, to carriages, because there is about the centrality of man walking, every man. It's a bridge for every man. You're absolutely right, all the other bridges- and New York has some extraordinary bridges.

The George Washington Bridge is also a gorgeous, amazing thing. The Verrazzano, these were also feats of engineering, but the Brooklyn Bridge is really a street that connects the two great boroughs. It was from this era of unification, the same eras of the transcontinental railway and the transoceanic cable, and there's something about it as a meeting place, that other bridges are really just about moving traffic, but the Brooklyn Bridge is a place where I think it's designed, you reach the top of that, a very soft arch. That's where the cables open up, and you have that view. That sense of ownership of the city.

I just wanted to say one of the things about that, Brian, because the bridge is aspirational, but it's also kind of admonition these days. It's very hard to imagine that we would do something like this. Something that's greater than it needed to be, greater than us, and longer lasting. It's so difficult to get anything done today. When we cross that bridge, when we walk across it, I think there's also that feeling like, could we do this again? What will it take to get us to a place where we're unified enough, or at least ambitious enough to aspire to something like the Brooklyn Bridge?

Brian Lehrer: Michael Kimmelman, New York Times architecture critic, and documentary filmmaker, Ken Burns, you can see them together in the new 10-minute Ken Burns short, celebrating today's 140th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge. You can see it on Ken's PBS page, which is called UNUM. That's UNUM as in E pluribus's last name, right, Ken?

Ken Burns: You got it. You got it. Exactly right. As Arthur Schlesinger said, "There's too much pluribus, not enough Unum." We're into Unum and we can't think of a better place to celebrate that than on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Brian Lehrer: Well, thanks for the Unum from the duo, both of you. Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Stay with us.

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