February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
A 23-year old bootblack named Steve Brodie had jumped from the new Brooklyn Bridge and lived to tell the tale. Although many would question the veracity of this and later stunts, most believed it and Brodie went on to become one of the most famous Americans of his day.
Steven Brodie was born in 1863 in Manhattan to Irish American parents. Little is known about his upbringing except that he left school early to earn a living as a newsboy and bootblack. He plied both trades in Lower Manhattan’s business district, between City Hall and Wall Street. Like a lot of East Side boys, Brodie grew up an excellent swimmer and in his late teens he joined the prestigious Volunteer Life Saving Corps (a precursor to modern-day lifeguards). He made several saves on the East River and at Coney Island. On one occasion he rescued a well-known actress who awarded him a gold locket as a token of her gratitude.
The Brooklyn Bridge opened in May 1883. Built largely with Irish labor, it took 14 years to complete. The finished product was not merely beautiful, it was also the tallest structure in North America, with two towers topping out at 275 feet. The roadbed, which accommodated pedestrians, horse-drawn vehicles, and a trolley, stood 135 feet above the East River — the equivalent of a 13-story building.
Immediately after the bridge’s opening, New Yorkers began debating whether a man could survive a jump from such a height. Two men eventually tried and were killed by the impact. These results, of course, only heightened the chances that someone else would try — the reasoning being that the greater the risk, the greater the fame.
As Steve Brodie later told it, he decided to jump when a fellow Irishman, Tom Brennan, offered him a bet of $100 (one-third a typical worker’s annual salary in those days), plus a promise of tremendous publicity via his connections in the newspaper industry. Brodie accepted and a few days later, on July 23, made the fateful jump.
Or did he? Even as word of Brodie’s famed feat spread about the city, skeptics began to raise questions. Wasn’t it suspicious, they asked, that the only witnesses to the jump were Brodie’s buddies? And what of the rumor that Brodie had actually faked the whole thing, having a friend drop a bag of iron casters from the bridge and then swimming underwater from a nearby pier to the point of the splash? No one ever offered satisfactory answers to these questions, but none of Brodie’s confederates ever recanted their version of the story. In any case, the public at large didn’t care about the details; it was simply too good a story to doubt.
Every paper in the city carried the story of Brodie’s jump and he immediately became the most famous man in New York City. His fame rose still higher when the police arrested him for making an illegal jump. Soon he was the talk of the nation.
Brodie eventually paid a fine and emerged from jail ready to capitalize on his fame. Alexander’s Museum, a competitor of P.T. Barnum, hired him to appear as an exhibit. In late 1888, doubtless in response to the fear that his fame was dimming, Brodie again captured headlines with a jump from a railway bridge in Poughkeepsie. Ten months later, his name was again on the front pages after he went over Niagara Falls. As before, both stunts raised eyebrows due to the lack of impartial eyewitnesses.
In 1890, Brodie, now 27, opened a saloon on the Bowery, the city’s center of working-class nightlife. It immediately became a huge success, earning Brodie a considerable fortune. It was particularly popular among tourist groups who came to see the famous jumper tell his story with the aid of a huge oil painting of the Brooklyn Bridge on the wall. More often than not these same tourists would also see celebrities like boxer John L. Sullivan.
The peak of Brodie’s celebrity came in 1894 when he was cast in the starring role in the musical “On the Bowery.” Brodie played himself in the role of a hero who continually comes to the rescue of a na