Emily Warren, the first project manager

Emily married Washington Roebling, son of the engineer who designed the Brooklyn Bridge John A. Roebling. Shortly after their wedding the couple traveled to Europe to study the use of box foundations for the bridge, and upon their return to New York they were greeted with bad news: Washington's father had died of tetanus. Thus, Emily's husband took over the construction of the bridge.

Soon the young Washington falls seriously ill due to decompression syndrome due to the pioneering use of pneumatic boxes for the foundation of the bridge. This fact left him bedridden for the rest of his days, and that's when Emily Warren Roebling became the first female field engineer, taking charge of the completion of the bridge.

Emily was in charge of informing her husband's assistants, who from the bed advised and gave orders to his wife, and she at the same time reported on the progress of the work on the bridge. Thus he developed a great knowledge of material resistance, stress analysis, construction of steel cables and calculation of catenary curves.

He took over most of the responsibilities of the Chief Engineer, including day-to-day supervision and project management. She fought with politicians, rival engineers and all those stakeholders associated with the work on the bridge, to the point where people believed that she was the one who had designed the bridge.

Over the next fourteen years, Emily's dedication to the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge was unceasing until she herself opened it in 1883.

At the opening ceremony, Emily was honored in a speech by Abram Stevens Hewitt, mayor of NY, who said the bridge "was a monument to the self-sacrificing devotion of a woman and her capacity for higher education, from which she had long been excluded"

Today, the Brooklyn Bridge has a plaque dedicated to the memory of Emily, her husband and her father-in-law.

On December 9, 2021, Emily Warren Roebling Square, located under the Brooklyn Bridge, was inaugurated in her honor.