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Spring 1941. "View under Roebling Suspension Bridge of Cincinnati from Kentucky side of the Ohio River. Waterfront showing numerous business houses: King Bag Company, Queen City Rag & Paper Company and others." 4x5 inch acetate negative for the FSA. View full size.
Here is the view today.
It is impossible to overestimate the importance of John A. Roebling in the history of American bridge building and civil engineering.
Suspension bridges were his specialty. Before the Cincinnati project, he completed the first railway suspension bridge (1855), across the Niagara River just below the Falls. Soon after, he built Pittsburgh's Sixth Street Bridge (1859). The Cincinnati bridge that now bears his name took eleven years to complete (1867) due to work stopping during the Civil War.
Finally came the most celebrated bridge ever built, the Brooklyn Bridge over New York's East River. Roebling deserves credit for the design, though he died (of tetanus caused by an accident at the site) six months before construction began. His son, Washington Roebling (who had worked on the Cincinnati bridge), finished the project.
That would be the Cincinnati Gas and Electric building, on the left (view cut off by the bridge). It's still around.
The building to the right, the Cincinnati and Suburban Bell Telphone Building, isn't (replaced by a formidable mass named Atrium Two). If fate could only save one of these, I think it made the right choice.
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