When people picture the Brooklyn Bridge, they usually think about steel cables, skyline views, and the famous stone towers. Down at street level, though, the bridge’s anchorages deserve their own spotlight. These huge masonry structures on the Manhattan and Brooklyn sides secure the cables that hold the bridge up, and they also support the approach roads.
Finished seven years before the bridge opened in 1883, the anchorages were built to impress as well as perform. The exterior features romanesque arches and rusticated granite walls with limestone trim. Inside, accounts described something more like a stone cavern. The chambers were dark, the barrel-vaulted ceilings rose about 50 feet, and the interior temperature stayed around 60 degrees.
That combination of scale and steady conditions led to a practical reuse during construction. Chief engineer Washington Roebling approved renting two chambers to liquor businesses that had been displaced by the bridge’s approach work, Rackey’s Wine Company in Brooklyn and Luyties & Co. in Manhattan. The rentals also helped address the $15 million debt tied to building what was then called the East River Bridge. Later rent rolls showed other tenants using the chambers for storage, including machinery, radiators, leather, lamps, grocers’ supplies, iron, and ship chandlery.
Over time, the wine cellars took on a strange cultural layer. Revelers painted and stenciled parts of the maze-like interior with French street names and grapevine-themed artwork on stucco. As Prohibition neared, the wine left, and city uses took over. In 1934, the vaults reopened briefly for a celebration as wine returned to storage.
Today, the former vaults hold city maintenance equipment. Nearby, the Manhattan-side space has become Gotham Park. A City Council proposal introduced earlier this spring would unseal the vaults again and rent them out, bringing the anchorages’ hidden masonry rooms back into public conversation.
Read the full, original article from Ephemeral New York here.