Howe’s Brooklyn: A 1907 Brooklyn March, other music time forgot, featured to raise funds for Promenade Gardens
Finally, after all these years, the 1907 Brooklyn Daily Eagle Bridge Crush March is heard live by a 21st Century audience in Brooklyn Heights.
Written at the turn of the last century by William E. Slafer, bandmaster of Slafer’s Brooklyn Marine Band, the ominously-titled march could have been simply paying homage to the daily ‘crush’ of commuters who took the trolley over Brooklyn Bridge in the early 1900s.
Or, it could have been written to recall the memories of the fateful opening day panic on the Brooklyn Bridge. When that happened, on May 23, 1883, no structures except church spires were more than five stories tall. Those first pedestrians to risk the Opening Day walk must have been apprehensive, even scared. Popular mythology, expressed in newspaper articles, had even questioned whether the bridge would stand, as nothing of that scale had been attempted. For a dramatic account of that panic, readers should go at once to David McCullough’s brilliant book, “BROOKLYN BRIDGE.” Suffice it to say here that lives were lost and people were “crushed” in the panic.