Excerpt:
John Roebling was enthusiastic.
"No other part of the East River offers a locality so favorable to bridging," the great engineer wrote to the New York businessmen who proposed building a span to link Manhattan and Long Island.
But the East River bridge that so interested Roebling was not the Brooklyn Bridge that would be the cornerstone of his enduring fame. This span -- proposed in 1856, more than a decade before the Brooklyn Bridge project took form in 1867 -- was what would become the Queensboro Bridge.