For someone from Brooklyn visiting Cincinnati, this is a treat – The John Roebling Suspension Bridge. Here we have the first large Roebling bridge over a river, and it was built well before the Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1866, and contained just about everything that would be enlarged and become one of the greatest bridges in all the world in New York City.
Both bridges opened years before vehicle traffic, althought the Brooklyn Bridge carried trains. The deck of this brdge supported only horses and horse-drawn vehicles for its first forty years. One slow Sunday afternoon i stood on the bridge and recorded the sound of a horse carriage traveling across it. Spontaneously the driver eventually asked me to hop on and cross the bridge with him while I recorded. This is one of the great things about location shooting, the fact that novel and spontaneous situations constantly occur, and, by taking advantage of them, we can tap into at least a small amount of novelty and originality, in this case, the simple sounds of hooves on a steel grated roadway crossing over the great Ohio River on the way into the solid ground of downtown Cincinnati.
In 1896 the steel deck was widened and built to support up to to 30 tons. During the Civil War, the war effort meant that the steel deck would be upgraded later, after the war, then upgraded again in 1896, in anticipation of truck and vehicle traffic that would explode into the 20th century, only to be downgrded again until, today, there is an eleven ton limit, meaning buses, let alone large trucks, are prohibited, and, once more, the bridge is horse and carriage friendly, with cars zipping by.