The Bridge Builders

The Bear Mountain Bridge was built by a group of highly accomplished engineers, designers, fabricators, and contractors whose shared educational ties, company connections, and earlier work helped them rise to the top of their professions. Under their guidance, the bridge was completed with unusual speed, at comparatively minimal cost, and without the loss of a single life, and techniques developed during its construction helped usher in a golden age of suspension bridge design. Howard Baird designed the bridge at the request of Frederick Tench, and his plans enabled Terry and Tench Construction Co. to estimate costs, present the project to the Harrimans, and secure the construction contract. Baird had advanced from draftsman to chief engineer at the Phoenix Bridge Company, Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company, and Boller, Hodge and Baird. He worked alongside Wilson F. Smith, chief engineer of the Bear Mountain Hudson River Bridge Company, consulting engineer William H. Burr, and Major William A. Welch of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission. Burr, regarded as one of the greatest engineers of the post-Civil War era, taught engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Harvard, and Columbia University and was associated with the Holland Tunnel, the old Croton Aqueduct, the Panama Canal, and other bridge projects including the George Washington Bridge. Smith, a student of Burr and a graduate of Columbia University’s School of Mines, had worked on projects for the New York City and Hudson River Rail Company and the New York Rapid Transit Commission and had supervised construction of the Kensico Dam and related structures. Welch oversaw beautification and development at Bear Mountain and Harriman State Parks, designed the Storm King Mountain Highway, began the New York-New Jersey Trail Conference, chaired the early Appalachian Trail Conference, and was a founder and first president of the National Council of State Parks. Steel fabrication was led by Howard H. McClintic, whose McClintic-Marshall Construction Company, founded with Charles D. Marshall in 1900, became the country’s largest independent steel manufacturing firm over the next 30 years. Steel erection was led by Frederick Tench, an early sponsor of the bridge plan who helped secure financing, and Edward F. Terry, with whom he had formed the Terry and Tench Construction Company in 1895 after earlier bridge work together. In cable construction, new theories tested at Bear Mountain made possible cables of almost any diameter and number of wires. Holton D. Robinson, a leading authority on bridge-cable construction, perfected a wrapping for cable strands and machinery for binding cables with wire, helping make the bridge’s rapid construction possible. Washington A. Roebling, eighty-seven-year-old president of John A. Roebling’s Sons, directed production of the bridge’s eighteen-inch cables. Educated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, he had built bridges for the Union Army during the Civil War, assisted his father on early railroad suspension bridges, later became chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge, and, after being incapacitated during that work, continued in cable construction with help from his wife, Emily. Roebling, Charles Sunderland, and Robinson developed and tested new cable spinning theories and methods during the bridge’s construction.

Stony Point, New York · United States