Wednesday marks the 140th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge, historic connector for Long Island

Getting on or off Long Island until 140 years ago meant boarding a boat or a ship or a ferry.

Or swimming.

May 24, 1883 marked the dawn of a new era — the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge, at the time the world’s longest suspension bridge, one with overhead cables supporting the roadway over the East River; the joining of two of the nation’s biggest then-independent cities, Brooklyn and Manhattan; and the connection of Long Island to the rest of the country.

“Long Island wouldn’t be Long Island without a transportation system, and Brooklyn wouldn’t be either, and the Brooklyn Bridge is really the beginning of this large-scale, highway transportation system, even mass transit system, that is important to Long Island. It’s a way that the very tip of Long Island, the western tip of Long Island, is developed in the 19th century, and things flow from here,” said Richard Haw, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and author of several books about the Brooklyn Bridge and its builder.

On a sunny Thursday afternoon 140 years ago, those gathered to open the bridge could sense the possibility in the air.

“The cities of New York and Brooklyn have constructed, and today rejoice in the possession of, the crowning glory of an age memorable for great industrial achievements,” a future mayor of New York, Abram Hewitt, said high above the East River as onlookers watched from rooftops, decks of steamboats below and, of course, the bridge deck.

He compared the feat to the pyramids.

Designed by civil engineer John A. Roebling, the Brooklyn Bridge featured stone towers that were higher than any building in New York City except for the Trinity Church steeple. The bridge’s four main cables had enough wire to stretch from there to London. The project took nearly 15 years to complete, cost $15 million and claimed as many as an estimated 40 lives.

At the time, the bridge was an engineering marvel — including the use of pneumatic caissons, hollow structures that are filled with compressed air, so workers could excavate the riverbed under water. That technology was a double-edged sword, as workers developed decompression sickness, or the bends, working in compressed air. After Washington Roebling, the builder's geologist son, developed the bends his wife, Emily, helped complete the project.

Out on Long Island, the opening of the bridge vastly expanded access to the bustling marketplaces in New York City and beyond.

“The big impetus is to try to find a way to — as the market revolution takes place in the 19th century — get the farming products from Long Island into a market, be it in Manhattan or New York or even further afield, into New Jersey or even down to Philadelphia,” Haw said.

There had long been commerce between New York City and Long Island, but by the late 19th century there were so many people and so much to sell and trade that the waterways couldn’t keep up with the demand.

Back then, Long Island, and even Brooklyn, were primarily farming communities.

“Can you imagine trying to get livestock over a river on a yacht, effectively?” Haw said.

Early on, pedestrians crossed the bridge for a penny. Driving a one-horse wagon over it cost 10 cents. It was 5 cents for a cow or horse and 2 cents for a sheep or hog. The bridge later got cable cars, which eventually were taken down. Today, it’s a bridge for motor vehicle drivers, cyclists and pedestrians.

And while Long Island would become America’s first car suburb in the middle of the next century, Brooklyn was America’s first suburb of any kind, whose development was hastened by the Brooklyn Bridge.

In 1880, just a few years before the bridge opened, Brooklyn’s population was about 599,000, ballooning to about 1.2 million by 1900, according to Philip Plotch, the principal researcher at the Eno Center for Transportation in Washington, D.C., and author of “Mobilizing the Metropolis: How the Port Authority Built New York.” (The five boroughs of New York City as we know it today were unified in 1898.)

“The population doubled after the Brooklyn Bridge opened, because so many people from the Lower East Side and so many immigrants all started to move down,” he said.

And by the 1930s, there were more people in Brooklyn than Manhattan.

The bridge’s appeal transcended the promise of easier commutes, according to the pitch by designer John A. Roebling.

“Manufacturers would have closer ties with New York markets. Long Island farmers and Brooklyn brewers could get their wares over the river more readily. The mail would move faster. Roebling had even told his eager clients how, in the event of an enemy invasion of Long Island, troops could be rushed over the bridge from New York in unprecedented numbers,” historian David McCullough wrote in his book “The Great Bridge.”

In the event of a foreign invasion of Long Island, according to Roebling’s calculations, nearly a half million men, along with artillery and baggage trains, could get over the bridge in 24 hours.

By Matthew Chayes

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Matthew Chayes, a Newsday reporter since 2007, covers New York City.