This time the caisson would be slightly larger and there were to be a number of important modifications. Roebling had decided to make the water shafts round instead of square, for example; he wanted the air locks positioned differently; and the entire interior would be lined with boiler plate, as fire protection, Roebling having realized by this time how very inadequate were the preventive measures he had specified in the Brooklyn caisson. With a caisson that might have to go twice the depth of the Brooklyn caisson, he wanted none of the anxieties there had been over fire.In November actual construction of the New York caisson got under way at Webb & Bell yards on the other side of the river, while the Brooklyn caisson continued steadily downward. Things were proceeding very nicely now. In the middle of the month Harper’s Weekly published a spectacular double-page view of lower New York and Brooklyn, as though seen from the air (“an unprecedented piece of engraving”), and there, bestriding the East River, bigger and grander by far than anything in sight, was the finished bridge.
