13. The Time That Elephants Crossed the Brooklyn Bridge
A year after the opening, P.T. Barnum helped to reassure the public of the bridge’s safety (while publicizing his circus) by leading a parade of 21 elephants over the bridge. The stunt is memorialized in the children’s book, 21 Elephants and Still Standing. The elephants made it safely across the bridge and the structure withstood their weight, which wasn’t surprising. The bridge was overbuilt to be six times stronger than necessary, with a capacity of 18,700 tons, or over 2,500 African elephants.
In 2017, Staten Island sculptor Joe Reginella took the story of the elephant crossing and twisted it into a fictional tale that inspired the fake memorial you see in the picture above. Reginella crafted the sculpture to commemorate the lives lost in the Brooklyn Bridge Elephant Stampede of October 24, 1929, the same day the stock market crashed. Of course, this never really happened. Reginella has also crafted memorials to an octopus attack on a ferry in a Staten Island harbor and a UFO tugboat abduction.