Steve Brodie
Encyclopedia
Steve Brodie was an American from New York City
who claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge
and survived on July 23, 1886. The resulting publicity from the supposed jump, whose veracity was disputed, gave Brodie publicity, a thriving saloon and a career as an actor.
Brodie's fame persisted long past his death, with Brodie portrayed in films and with the slang terms "taking a Brodie" and "Brodie" entering the language for "taking a chance" and "suicidal leap."
named Robert Emmet Odlum
, the brother of women's rights activist Charlotte Odlum Smith
, was killed while attempting the same stunt in May 1885.
The jump supposedly made by Brodie was from a height of 135 feet (41.1 m), the same as a 14-story building. The contemporary New York Times account said the jump was from a height of about 120 feet (36.6 m).
The New York Times backed his account of the jump and said that Brodie practiced for the leap by making shorter jumps from other bridges and ships' masts, and that it was witnessed by two reporters. He leaped into the East River, feet first, and emerged uninjured, though with pain on his right side. He was jailed after the jump. The Times described Brodie as a "newsboy and long distance pedestrian" who jumped from the bridge to win a $200 bet. In other accounts he is described as a bookmaker
and gambler. A Bowery storekeeper named Isaac Meyers claimed that he encouraged Brodie to jump off the Brooklyn bridge after Brodie said that he wanted to be famous. Another account holds that Moritz Herzber, a liquor dealer, offered to back a saloon for Brodie if he made the jump and lived.
If true, he would have been one of only four people to have jumped off the bridge and survived, but his claim was disputed. It was subsequently claimed that a dummy was thrown from the bridge and that Brodie fell out of a row boat.
After the jump, Brodie opened a saloon at 114 Bowery
near Grand Street
, which also became a museum for his bridge-jumping stunt. Among the decorations was an affidavit from the boat captain who claimed to pull him from the water.
He became an actor capitalizing on his reputation, appearing in the vaudeville musicals Mad Money and On the Bowery, and opened a saloon in Buffalo, New York
.
Brodie died in San Antonio, Texas in 1901. The cause of death has been variously described as diabetes and tuberculosis.
said that he probably did not make the jump. McCullough said that it was commonly believed by skeptics that a dummy was dropped from the bridge, and that Brodie merely swam out from shore and surfaced beside a passing barge.
Brodie, who was unemployed and aware of the publicity generated by Odlom's fatal jump, bragged to his pals on the Bowery that he would take the jump. Wagers were made for and against, but Brodie never announced when he would make the attempt.
The Brooklyn Eagle
reported in 1930 that a retired police sergeant and friend of Brodie's, Thomas K. Hastings, said that Brodie had told him that he didn't make the leap and never said he did.
New York City police said in 1986, the 100th anniversary of the supposed jump, that two or three people jump from the bridge every year and some live.
Brodie became a popular symbol of the Bowery
, appeared personally in musical shows, and his character was used many times in film depictions of old New York.
Brodie starred in a three-act play entitled On the Bowery, which opened in 1894. A facsimile of Brodie's saloon was the setting for the second act, and Brodie sang a song "My Poil is a Bowery Goil." The play culminated with Brodie jumping off the bridge.
In 1933, Brodie was portrayed by George Raft
in Raoul Walsh
's film The Bowery
. In the film, Brodie can't find the dummy at the last minute and has to make the jump.
Brodie appears as a character in the 1949 Warner Bros.
cartoon short Bowery Bugs
, with Bugs Bunny
making Brodie jump off the bridge.
In Samuel Fuller
's film on early New York newspapers, Park Row
(1952), the character Steve Brodie is a character in the film, actually does jump from the bridge, and is the primary focus for the first edition of The Globe newspaper.
Brodie was the inspiration for Kelly
, a 1965 musical
that closed after one performance on Broadway
, making it one of the worst flops in Broadway history. It was successfully revived in 1998 by the York Theatre Company.
Years later, an actor named John Stevenson
used Brodie's name for his movie stage name
.
In P.G. Wodehouse's novel, Damsel in Distress
, visitors to Belpher Castle hear the story of Lord Leonard Forth's leap from an upper-story window to avoid a confrontation with the father of the lady whose boudoir it was. "A murmur of admiration greeted the recital of the ready tact of this eighteenth-century Steve Brodie." Wodehouse also references Brodie in The Little Nugget
when a character falls through the roof of a stable.
The phrase "taken a Brody" is used in Thomas Pynchon
's 1963 novel V.
—"And next day she would read in the paper where Esther Harvitz, twenty-two, honors graduate of CCNY, had taken a Brody off some bridge, overpass or high building"
David Foster Wallace
reported that "a sixteen-year-old male did a Brody off the upper deck of a Megaship" in his "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
" essay.
The "spinning knobs" once commonly bolted to the steering wheels of farm implements and trucks prior to the advent of power steering were referred to as "suicide knobs" and, by association, "Brodie knob
s," as their misuse could lead to loss of control of the vehicle.
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
who claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge
Brooklyn Bridge
The Brooklyn Bridge is one of the oldest suspension bridges in the United States. Completed in 1883, it connects the New York City boroughs of Manhattan and Brooklyn by spanning the East River...
and survived on July 23, 1886. The resulting publicity from the supposed jump, whose veracity was disputed, gave Brodie publicity, a thriving saloon and a career as an actor.
Brodie's fame persisted long past his death, with Brodie portrayed in films and with the slang terms "taking a Brodie" and "Brodie" entering the language for "taking a chance" and "suicidal leap."
The alleged bridge jump
The bridge, then known as the East River Bridge, had opened just three years before Brodie's claimed jump. A swimming instructor from Washington, D.C.Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., formally the District of Columbia and commonly referred to as Washington, "the District", or simply D.C., is the capital of the United States. On July 16, 1790, the United States Congress approved the creation of a permanent national capital as permitted by the U.S. Constitution....
named Robert Emmet Odlum
Robert Emmet Odlum
Robert Emmet Odlum was an American swimming instructor. He was the brother of women's rights activist Charlotte Odlum Smith. Odlum was the first person to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, and was killed doing so.- Early life :...
, the brother of women's rights activist Charlotte Odlum Smith
Charlotte odlum smith
Charlotte Odlum Smith was a reformer, magazine editor, champion of women inventors, and lobbyist for working women, public health, and safety in the nineteenth-century United States.-Birth and Early Life:...
, was killed while attempting the same stunt in May 1885.
The jump supposedly made by Brodie was from a height of 135 feet (41.1 m), the same as a 14-story building. The contemporary New York Times account said the jump was from a height of about 120 feet (36.6 m).
The New York Times backed his account of the jump and said that Brodie practiced for the leap by making shorter jumps from other bridges and ships' masts, and that it was witnessed by two reporters. He leaped into the East River, feet first, and emerged uninjured, though with pain on his right side. He was jailed after the jump. The Times described Brodie as a "newsboy and long distance pedestrian" who jumped from the bridge to win a $200 bet. In other accounts he is described as a bookmaker
Bookmaker
A bookmaker, or bookie, is an organization or a person that takes bets on sporting and other events at agreed upon odds.- Range of events :...
and gambler. A Bowery storekeeper named Isaac Meyers claimed that he encouraged Brodie to jump off the Brooklyn bridge after Brodie said that he wanted to be famous. Another account holds that Moritz Herzber, a liquor dealer, offered to back a saloon for Brodie if he made the jump and lived.
If true, he would have been one of only four people to have jumped off the bridge and survived, but his claim was disputed. It was subsequently claimed that a dummy was thrown from the bridge and that Brodie fell out of a row boat.
After the jump, Brodie opened a saloon at 114 Bowery
Bowery
Bowery may refer to:Streets:* The Bowery, a thoroughfare in Manhattan, New York City* Bowery Street is a street on Coney Island in Brooklyn, N.Y.In popular culture:* Bowery Amphitheatre, a building on the Bowery in New York City...
near Grand Street
Grand Street (Manhattan)
Grand Street is a street in Manhattan, New York City. It runs east-west parallel to and south of Delancey Street, from SoHo through Chinatown, Little Italy, the Lower East Side to the East River....
, which also became a museum for his bridge-jumping stunt. Among the decorations was an affidavit from the boat captain who claimed to pull him from the water.
He became an actor capitalizing on his reputation, appearing in the vaudeville musicals Mad Money and On the Bowery, and opened a saloon in Buffalo, New York
Buffalo, New York
Buffalo is the second most populous city in the state of New York, after New York City. Located in Western New York on the eastern shores of Lake Erie and at the head of the Niagara River across from Fort Erie, Ontario, Buffalo is the seat of Erie County and the principal city of the...
.
Brodie died in San Antonio, Texas in 1901. The cause of death has been variously described as diabetes and tuberculosis.
Controversy over jump
In the years since Brodie claimed to have made the jump, controversy has swirled over whether he really did it. In his book The Great Bridge, historian David McCulloughDavid McCullough
David Gaub McCullough is an American author, narrator, historian, and lecturer. He is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian award....
said that he probably did not make the jump. McCullough said that it was commonly believed by skeptics that a dummy was dropped from the bridge, and that Brodie merely swam out from shore and surfaced beside a passing barge.
Brodie, who was unemployed and aware of the publicity generated by Odlom's fatal jump, bragged to his pals on the Bowery that he would take the jump. Wagers were made for and against, but Brodie never announced when he would make the attempt.
The Brooklyn Eagle
Brooklyn Eagle
The Brooklyn Daily Bulletin began publishing when the original Eagle folded in 1955. In 1996 it merged with a newly revived Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and now publishes a morning paper five days a week under the Brooklyn Daily Eagle name...
reported in 1930 that a retired police sergeant and friend of Brodie's, Thomas K. Hastings, said that Brodie had told him that he didn't make the leap and never said he did.
New York City police said in 1986, the 100th anniversary of the supposed jump, that two or three people jump from the bridge every year and some live.
In popular culture
Bowery
Bowery may refer to:Streets:* The Bowery, a thoroughfare in Manhattan, New York City* Bowery Street is a street on Coney Island in Brooklyn, N.Y.In popular culture:* Bowery Amphitheatre, a building on the Bowery in New York City...
, appeared personally in musical shows, and his character was used many times in film depictions of old New York.
Brodie starred in a three-act play entitled On the Bowery, which opened in 1894. A facsimile of Brodie's saloon was the setting for the second act, and Brodie sang a song "My Poil is a Bowery Goil." The play culminated with Brodie jumping off the bridge.
In 1933, Brodie was portrayed by George Raft
George Raft
George Raft was an American film actor and dancer identified with portrayals of gangsters in crime melodramas of the 1930s and 1940s...
in Raoul Walsh
Raoul Walsh
Raoul Walsh was an American film director, actor, founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the brother of silent screen actor George Walsh...
's film The Bowery
The Bowery (1933 film)
The Bowery is a 1933 historical film about the Lower East Side of Manhattan at the turn of the century. The movie was directed by Raoul Walsh and features Wallace Beery as saloon owner Chuck Connors, George Raft as Steve Brodie, the first man to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge and live, Jackie Cooper...
. In the film, Brodie can't find the dummy at the last minute and has to make the jump.
Brodie appears as a character in the 1949 Warner Bros.
Warner Bros. Cartoons
Warner Bros. Cartoons, Inc. was the in-house division of Warner Bros. Pictures during the Golden Age of American animation. One of the most successful animation studios in American media history, Warner Bros. Cartoons was primarily responsible for the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies theatrical...
cartoon short Bowery Bugs
Bowery Bugs
Bowery Bugs is a Bugs Bunny cartoon directed by Arthur Davis, written by Lloyd Turner and Bill Scott, and released in mid-1949 as part of the Merrie Melodies series...
, with Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny
Bugs Bunny is a animated character created in 1938 at Leon Schlesinger Productions, later Warner Bros. Cartoons. Bugs is an anthropomorphic gray rabbit and is famous for his flippant, insouciant personality and his portrayal as a trickster. He has primarily appeared in animated cartoons, most...
making Brodie jump off the bridge.
In Samuel Fuller
Samuel Fuller
Samuel Michael Fuller was an American screenwriter, novelist, and film director known for low-budget genre movies with controversial themes.-Personal life:...
's film on early New York newspapers, Park Row
Park Row (film)
Park Row is a 1952 drama film directed by Samuel Fuller. It stars Gene Evans and Mary Welch.-Cast:*Gene Evans as Phinneas Mitchell*Mary Welch as Charity Hackett*Bela Kovacs as Ottmar Mergenthaler*Herbert Heyes as Josiah Davenport...
(1952), the character Steve Brodie is a character in the film, actually does jump from the bridge, and is the primary focus for the first edition of The Globe newspaper.
Brodie was the inspiration for Kelly
Kelly (musical)
Kelly is a musical with a book and lyrics by Eddie Lawrence and music by Mark Charlap. It was inspired by Steve Brodie, who in 1886 claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived...
, a 1965 musical
Musical theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatre combining songs, spoken dialogue, acting, and dance. The emotional content of the piece – humor, pathos, love, anger – as well as the story itself, is communicated through the words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an...
that closed after one performance on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...
, making it one of the worst flops in Broadway history. It was successfully revived in 1998 by the York Theatre Company.
Years later, an actor named John Stevenson
Steve Brodie (actor)
Steve Brodie was an American movie and television actor.Born John Stevenson in El Dorado, Kansas, he took his screen name from the Steve Brodie who claimed that he jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge in 1886 and survived...
used Brodie's name for his movie stage name
Stage name
A stage name, also called a showbiz name or screen name, is a pseudonym used by performers and entertainers such as actors, wrestlers, comedians, and musicians.-Motivation to use a stage name:...
.
In P.G. Wodehouse's novel, Damsel in Distress
A Damsel in Distress (novel)
A Damsel in Distress is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse, first published in the United States on 4 October 1919 by George H. Doran, New York, and in the United Kingdom by Herbert Jenkins, London, on 17 October 1919...
, visitors to Belpher Castle hear the story of Lord Leonard Forth's leap from an upper-story window to avoid a confrontation with the father of the lady whose boudoir it was. "A murmur of admiration greeted the recital of the ready tact of this eighteenth-century Steve Brodie." Wodehouse also references Brodie in The Little Nugget
The Little Nugget
The Little Nugget is a novel by P. G. Wodehouse. It was first published in Munsey's Magazine in August 1913, before being published as a book in the U.K. on August 28, 1913 by Methuen & Co, London, and in the U.S. on February 10, 1914 by W.J. Watt and Co., New York...
when a character falls through the roof of a stable.
The phrase "taken a Brody" is used in Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's 1963 novel V.
V.
V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named...
—"And next day she would read in the paper where Esther Harvitz, twenty-two, honors graduate of CCNY, had taken a Brody off some bridge, overpass or high building"
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California...
reported that "a sixteen-year-old male did a Brody off the upper deck of a Megaship" in his "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments is a 1997 collection of nonfiction writing by David Foster Wallace.In the title essay, originally published in Harper's as "Shipping Out", Wallace describes the excesses of his one-week trip in the Caribbean aboard the cruise ship ,...
" essay.
The "spinning knobs" once commonly bolted to the steering wheels of farm implements and trucks prior to the advent of power steering were referred to as "suicide knobs" and, by association, "Brodie knob
Brodie knob
Named after "bridge jumper" Steve Brodie , a brodie knob is a knob that attaches to the steering wheel of an automobile. The knob swivels, and is intended to make steering with one hand less difficult. Brodie knobs are also known as necker knobs, because they allow steering with one hand while...
s," as their misuse could lead to loss of control of the vehicle.