Five years before the bridge was ready for traffic, officials, engineers and foremen view the completion of the main suspension cables on the Brooklyn Bridge.

John A. Roebling's Brooklyn Bridge was still unfinished when these men posed - the engineers and foremen on one side, the top-hatted financial and political types on the other. They had a few years to go before the job was done and the poet Walt Whitman declared that New York had something that fulfilled Christopher Columbus's mission.