The Brooklyn Bridge | New York City

I grew up in Eastern Pennsylvania, 85 miles west of New York City. Thanks to our 5-minute proximity to the interstate highway (hi, I-78), a day trip to “the City” was always within reach, and usually a good idea. School field trips had us bussed into New York for the day to go to museums or to see a show (one particular 8th-grade field trip sticks out in my mind: there are pictures of us huddled on a ferry in front of the Twin Towers circa March 2001). I’ve taken the charter bus with my grandmother to visit one of my aunts when she lived in Queens. I’ve seen practically all the Disney movies on Broadway (s/o to the original Beauty & the Beast — 1994!). Once, when our high school had meticulously planned a “senior trip” to the Six Flags theme park in New Jersey, a few friends (who shall remain nameless for fear of an unexpired statute of limitations on truancy) and I skipped out, drove into the city, and made our senior-year memories by just walking around Manhattan all day, taking in the chaos. After college, and later, grad school, friends moved (or returned) to New York, prompting more visits to more boroughs and offering a new look at everyday life in the world’s biggest and busiest metropolis.

What I’m trying to convey is: I feel like I’ve got New York City down. Yet on a very recent trip over winter break 2019-2020, I came to realize that maybe I don’t really know NYC like I imagine I do? Case in point: I discovered that, regardless of all my previous city adventures, I had never ever been to the Brooklyn Bridge. Never walked across it, never even stared up at it from down below. Thanks to a meet-up with my fiancé’s cousin and her boyfriend, I finally got a chance to get up close and personal with this iconic bridge.

It was December (just after Christmas), it was cold, and due to some general confusion around where we were supposed to go for dinner, we ended up walking across the Brooklyn Bridge twice (in the span of, like, two hours). The upshot here was that we were able to experience the views from the bridge at different points in the evening, which translated into some really cool photographs. It made New York feel like an adventure all over again.