Pedestrians make their way across the Brooklyn Bridge some time around 1905. Hats weren't mandatory, but they were welcome.

The Brooklyn Bridge, completed in 1883, essentially made is fate accompli that Kingsborough would eventually become incorporated into New York Cite  and the modern NYC that we know today would be formed. It is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the U.S. and a marvel of engineering. But it it lacks a tavern. It didn’t have to be the way, though, since one crazy visionary back on the day petitioned for the right to open a bar on the bridge. An excerpt from a story in the June 13, 1893 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“The Brooklyn Bridge has long been a point of pilgrimage for ambitious cranks. The man who aspired to open a beer saloon at the nearer tower is by no means alone in extravagant ambition. Time is not distant since a woman philanthropist wanted to turn the structure into a nursery. Another charitable individual of the gentler sex proposed to raise a fund for the relief of deserving Hottentots by starting roof gardens on the summits of the granite piers. Professional jumpers and unprofessional suicides have given the swinging span a measure of grewsome notoriety that contrasts sternly with the more generous projects proposed. It only remains to ask the use of the roadway for a horse race or the promenade for a baseball match in order to realize the novelty of which the bridge is capable.

From the standpoint of conservative administration the trustees did right to reject the petition for a saloon franchise. They should not, however, feel too harshly toward the misguided man who submitted it. There are so few drinking places in these cities, especially in the neighborhood of the approaches, that the petitioner undoubtedly supposed he was entering on a project of mercy. There is visible a certain benevolence in his scheme to supply the gurgle of amber beer, the sparkle of delicious cocktails and the aroma of seductive juleps in a region bereft, down to date, of facilities for providing cooling and stimulating drinks.”

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Brooklyn Bridge trolley crossing, 1899: