FogHorn June 14, 2018  - Mark Berrio - Building the Brooklyn Bridge -  Mark Berrio

As a student, he married his present wife, Margaret, a graduate student in psychology, and they headed back to Guatemala, where Mark worked for a half-American, half-French company designing  steel structures. But Margaret was uneasy with the political situation in Guatemala at the time, and the couple returned to the U.S. where Mark worked for a St. Louis company that designed domes for large sporting events. Among them was the Astrodome in Houston and also a smaller dome in San Sebastian, Spain, where his family is from. His wife obtained her master's degree in music education. Following the collapse of one of the domes, a major shock to the engineer who had designed it, he was drawn back to school in Michigan and got his Ph.D. in engineering mechanics.  His wife, meanwhile, taught young children to play the violin, using the Suzuki method.

 

Other accomplishments of the husband and wife included his teaching at Tufts University in 1972 while she got her master's degree in psychology, him teaching structural engineering at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, Indiana from 1973-1986 while she obtained her Ph.D. in psychology from Indiana University. He taught structural engineering at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo while she also taught, psychology, at Cal Poly, from 1986 to 2006. From 2006 to 2013 he took art classes at Cal Poly, emphasizing live drawing (his favorite,) watercolor and oil.

 

In July 2017 they moved to Half Moon Bay, and the following January he realized that, despite his architectural engineering skills, "I could no longer trim my toe nails;" so he consulted with and made the acquaintance of Dr. Irwin Cohen. In May 2018 he was invited by Irwin to come speak to Rotary to talk about the Brooklyn Bridge.

"I bit the bullet and accepted," he wrote.

 

According to notes on "The Brooklyn Bridge" by David McCullough (1972) that Berrio passed around to the club, and the Ken Burns film "Brooklyn Bridge, the "Great Bridge" was designed by Prussian-born John Augustus Roebling, who was baptized in the church where Bach played the organ in 1815. Roebling studied architecture, bridge construction and hydraulics, (funded by his grandmother) and philosophy (from Hegel, who regarded him as a favorite pupil.) It was inspired by the first suspension bridge he saw in Bavaria, which inspired him to become a bridge designer. With a motto of "No man was ever great by imitation," (from a quote by Samuel Johnson,) he came to America in 1831, originally to be a farmer, with brother Karl. They bought 7,000 acres of land at $1.37 per acre, near Pittsburg. He invited other Germans to settle with them, he built his town Germania, later calling it Saxonburg, married a tailor's daughter and became a citizen in 1837.

 

Roebling was known for his dignity, purposefulness and determination, as well as a fierce work ethic (he apparently never took a day off and would never give up.) A true Renaissance man he was also, amongst other things, a writer and musician. He envisioned the bridge as "the greatest bridge in existence."

 

The bridge's chief building engineer was Roebling's son Washington, assisted by Washington's wife Emily. Construction began in early 1870; the length of the main span was 1,595  feet, six inches, with the length of side spans 930 feet. The total length of the bridge, and approaches was 6,016 feet, or one mile and two blocks. The bridge has four, 3,578-foot, six-inch cables, more than 15 inches in diameter each; the number of wires in each cable is 5,434 for a total of 14,060 miles in length.  With a total of 85,159 cubic yards of masonry in the towers, the total weight of the bridge is 14,680 tons, at an original cost of $15,100,000.

The bridge was also called the Roebling Bridge, the Great Bridge, the New York Bridge, and of course the Brooklyn Bridge (it had no official name, apparently.) It is 85 feet wide. The height of the bridge road, and the height of the towers, is 119 feet at the tower and 276 feet, six inches, above high water respectively. There are 5,434 wires in each cable.

 

Despite all these dry statistics, Mark's humorous personality and presentation brought a lighthearted note to this fascinating piece of history.