The Brooklyn Bridge is thus one of the mechanical wonders of the world, one of the greatest and most characteristic of the monuments of the nineteenth century. Its towers, at least, bid fair to outlast every structure of which they command a view. When our New-Zealander takes his stand above the saddles which are now ridden by the cables of the bridge, to look over the site of a forsaken city, there will be no ruins of churches at least of churches now in being for him to sketch or see. The web of woven steel which now hangs between the stark masses of the towers may have disappeared, its slender filaments rusted into nothingness under the slow corrosion of the centuries. Its builders and the generation for which they wrought may have been as long forgotten as are now the builders of the Pyramids, whereof the traveller, as he paceth amazedly those deserts, asks the Historic Muse who builded them; and she mumbleth something, but what it is he heareth not. It is not unimaginable that our future archæologist, looking from one of these towers upon the solitude of a mastless river and a dispeopled land, may have no other means of reconstructing our civilization than that which is furnished him by the tower on which he stands. What will his judgment of us be?

Schuyler, Montgomery, "The Bridge as a Monument." Harper's Weekly, May 26, 1883, p.326.