Leaping a potent congregation of impossibilities, the Brooklyn Bridge is a flock of prayers answered.

Tethered like a stone stitch to two islands, taming space and water, eras and erosion, it is our messiah—unfurling its long, stiff arms into the very souls of the cities it unites. Its soiled palms lift upwards, accepting all, accepting you. One leg standing knee-deep in the forever murk of the East River, the other stationed firm on the wordless bedrock of Brooklyn.

Like the borough it is named after, the great bridge is a merging of the foreign and far-off. It was dreamed up by John Augustus Roebling, a Prussian who was educated in Berlin before farming the land of Pennsylvania. It was built by German, Italian, and Irish workers. Its paint came from the mines of Wyoming, its granite from the quarries of Maine, its yellow pine caissons from the forests of Georgia and Florida.

On Thursday, May 24, 1883, 124 years ago, its first crossers paid one cent to wear the emotions of holy men and walk above water. The date was declared “The People’s Day” — an official holiday for all. Thousands marched 1.13 miles on a structure that stood higher than all but one that day — the Trinity Church.

On March 27, 2006, we are due to meet a songwriter named Sufjan from Detroit, Michigan. Spring is official, but winter has its battered, dying fingers pressed lightly on the city. Ribbons of people move in rows alongside me, flipping coins of conversation around my ears — their secrets and snippets twittering from chapped lips like forlorn bees escaping a hive. Their words get caught in my hair, my eyelashes, before fluttering like sycamore seeds to the river. Will I ever tire of staring at these faces? Absorbing their thoughts through sideways glances? Trying to swallow lives in quick sips?

I keep moving through the flesh motorcade and the planks awaken into sky. To my left on the Manhattan Bridge, a subway, like a single strand of tinsel, slowly slides and clicks. As I walk in a steady beat, from Manhattan to Brooklyn, I’m rolling the lyrics from one of Sufjan’s songs around my tongue like a handful of Tic Tacs:

“I drove to New York, in the van, with my friend
We slept in parking lots, I don’t mind, I don’t mind
I was in love with the place, in my mind, in my mind”

We meet him below the Brooklyn arch, beneath the gothic cut. He rides a bicycle to reach us. Mr. Stevens is known for his ability to capture a place, its rhythms, its myths, its buried stories, in song. He is also known as the singer who wants to create an album for every US state. He’s completed two, Michigan and Illinois. I wonder, since he’s been living here for years, when New York will come up.

“Probably when I leave,” he says, looking down between the boards, possibly searching for answers within the swaying broth of secrets beneath us. Across the river, the spires of Brooklyn’s churches lift like masts from a pageant of shipwrecks. We stand between worlds surrounded by dancing steel ropes. Diagonal and looping cables holding us in a place where only spells and rumors existed years ago. Before this eighth wonder, this was nowhere.

“I think the first time I moved here, to New York, it was an infatuation just based on total fantasy. But when I moved to Brooklyn it was a deeper love, kinda like a marriage.” With the way he speaks about Brooklyn, the New York album may never come.

Sufjan Stevens, 30: Musician (opposite)

“I grew up in Michigan and I eventually moved to New York to attend the New School for the writing program. I think I was always a musician even before I could play an instrument and I think I wanted to be a writer. Writing was more a sort of self-conscious desire through education, classes and reading. It was kind of a personal aspiration, whereas music was my natural language from the beginning. Writing was kind of a way to thwart music because I couldn’t really perceive of a way to be a musician as a vocation or practical way of life. I could see myself as a writer or journalist. But when I got here I started meeting lots of other musicians and they just coaxed me into playing and recording songs and participating in their shows. I did it kind of unwillingly at first and I kept saying ‘No, I’m a writer. I’ll do this because you invited me. But I’m working on my book and I want to get published.’ But eventually it took over and now I consider myself a failed writer.

I moved to Brooklyn about seven years ago. I first lived over by the Seaport across this bridge. Honestly I think I’d only been to Brooklyn once while I was living in Manhattan. It was just across this bridge and I kind of saw it as this odd mysterious place that I’d never been to. It’s so dumb that I never visited it. I thought New York was Manhattan. And of course what a surprise when I actually moved over the river to near East Williamsburg. The street I lived on was all Puerto Rican. There were those two big Purina Dog Chow buildings that the Brooklyn Union Gas Company owned. I wasn’t far from those. We used to say those were our Twin Towers. Then I moved pretty much every year to a different neighborhood, which was intense. I just didn’t have a lot of money and someone would move out and I couldn’t afford the rent. I had just quit my job. You know how it is.

Now I’m in Kensington. It’s kind of like the suburbs of Brooklyn. It’s quiet and it’s not cool at all, which I like. But it’s a short bike ride to all the cool neighborhoods. It’s cheap. It’s like the last affordable neighborhood where you can buy stuff. There are houses with driveways, which is unusual here. And it’s really diverse. There’s no dominant culture there. A lot of Jewish families, Chinese Americans, Polish Russians. It doesn’t seem like anyone is entitled to that neighborhood. It’s just mixed.

New York and Brooklyn have helped broaden my understanding of reality and the ‘American experience.’ Coming from the Midwest, there is a particular type of regional characteristic to that area that you see in most people. There are immigrants and different cultures there, but generally there is a consensus of thought and ideology that you can use to describe the Midwest. That isn’t true for New York, especially Brooklyn. It’s such a melting pot and it’s a point of interest for everyone in the world. I don’t know anywhere else where you have so many dif ferent people and cultures getting together and getting along and tolerating each other. For the most part that is pretty supernatural.”

Photographed on the Brooklyn Bridge