Walking the Brooklyn Bridge is a unique experience with stunning views. PAUL SULLIVAN

A Fredericksburg visitor to New York City admires the venerable Brooklyn Bridge, an American icon. By Paul Sullivan

Date published: 6/25/2005

THERE ARE SOME among us who travel often to New York City, others who have never been. I fall someplace in-between, having been fewer than a dozen times.

Kids make memories. The places they see, the things they do, even the smells they smell, often last a lifetime, even steer the ship of their lives.

And so it was with me and the Brooklyn Bridge.

I was 6. There was a war on, air-raid blackouts in the Great City when my mother took me to visit her sister Sissy.

This is what I remember: Sirens in the night, lights out, adults shushing everyone around them (why the quiet insistence I still do not know); a great vessel lying on its side in the harbor (now I know it was the burned hulk of the great liner Normandie), and Sissy's feisty terrier mutt, rescued from the streets of The Village, where she lived.

And the distant sight of the towering Brooklyn Bridge!

They never took me to the bridge. I had seen the bridges of Washington, but they were nothing like this monumental thing, and I knew I had a date with it, someday.

I can't believe I waited so long. Brooklyn's bridge is, surely, Manhattan's, too, but the vast structure bears the name of those who backed and had the most to gain from it, and they were mostly leading lights of Brooklyn.

The story of the Brooklyn Bridge is many things but mostly it is the story of an incredible human enterprise by John Roebling, his son, Washington Roebling and Washington's wife, Emily. Without the three of them, there would be no Brooklyn Bridge. Oh, there would be bridges linking the little farming community of Brooklyn to mighty New York City, but they would not have been the same.

Because of the Roeblings, and especially the amazing elder Roebling, world bridge design and engineering took a quantum leap forward, not only in size and appearance but, more importantly, in the materials and techniques used to build them that made it possible to span great reaches of river.

Date published: 6/25/2005