There's a curious slogan written in giant letters on the bridge which spans the Delaware River between Pennsylvania and Trenton, New Jersey.

Here's what it looked like earlier today:

I have no idea how many times I've driven across that bridge and wondered about the meaning of the message, but I always assumed it had something to do with days long in Trenton's past, as the classically elegant architectural feactures of Trenton's crumbling downtown area stand at once stand in sharp contrast against the severe economic depression of the city today just as they seem to recoil against it. (I'm surprised today's wannabe Ceausescus haven't done to them what that bastard did to Bucharest....)

Were it not for this blog's ongoing interest in America's latent Classicism, I might never have been motivated enough to research the history of the sign, but today I have, and I found my suspicions confirmed. The sign dates to 1911 -- a happier and far more prosperous time for Trenton. Unfortunately, the sign's irony is now the butt of jokes:

....[I]n 1911, they proclaimed their knack for industry with a sign hung from the trusses of the lower Delaware River bridge. Slightly changed, it's a phrase that still rings generations later:

'Trenton Makes, the World Takes."

Longer than a football field and made of glowing neon, the sign is like a welcome mat for everyone who gets to Trenton by crossing the river - and an electric monument to civic boosterism.

The sign has survived war, depression and energy crisis. it survives the inevitable snide jokes about how Trenton is no longer making anything and the world is no longer taking from it. It survives criticism like that of writer Paul Fussell, who called the slogan "an idiomatic disaster" and used it to illustrate America's culture of hucksterism in his 1991 book, "BAD."

Trenton in 1911 made the the steel rope used to hold up the world's longest suspension bridges and the anvils used to forge the nation's iron. It made pottery and rubber and wall plaster and cars and farm tools and mattresses and watches and bricks and linoleum an cigars.

It even made the world's largest bathtub and shipped it to Washington so the president, William Howard Taft, could soak his 350-pound body.

(If President Bush managed to increase his weight to such a size, people would call it a national security issue, and possibly demand his resignation.)

While in Trenton, I visited the Mercer Cemetery, at its height during the Neo-Classical period.

A couple of views:

Perhaps because everything is dying, cemeteries are at their best this time of year.

I found myself drawn to the grave of William Borrow -- a man who died in 1854 at the age of 33. The grave is very worn, but the bas-relief depicts an important invention:

I'd never heard of Borrow before, but it turns out that history (especially archtitectural history) is indebted to him for having made it possible to manufacture the I-beam.

The desideratum was therefore to make a solid rolled flanged beam of the right shape and proportions, and of the weight required for the spans ordinarily adopted in the buildings of large cities. The method of rolling such flanged beams was finally brought into successful operation at the iron-works of the Trenton Iron Company, situated in Trenton, N. J. The difficulties to be overcome in contriving and constructing the necessary machinery were very great. The mass of iron required for each beam, and which has, of course, to be pressed through the rollers at almost a white heat, is enormously heavy. Then the difficulty of constructing the rollers so that the iron, in passing through between them, shall have formed upon it flauges so wide as are necessary for beams, was very serious. We can not here describe the means by which at length the end was attained. * The arrangement was invented by a young Englishman named William Borrow. He was a relative of the author of Lavengro and of the Bible in Spain. Mr. Peter Cooper, under whose general charge the operation was conducted, was specially interested in the work, from the desire to employ such beams for the purpose of making fire-proof the large edifice which he was then erecting in New York for the Scientific Institution. He calculated that he should be able to put up the machinery in four months, and at an expense of about thirty thousand dollars.

The difficulties were, however, found to be far greater than had been foreseen. Instead of four months, it was two years before the machinery was brought into successful operation, and the cost of it, instead of thirty, was a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. And when at length the machinery was made to work successfully, the designer, Mr. Borrow, suddenly became ill, and died within a week, from the prostration of all his energies, mental and physical--a martyr to the difficulties which beset the practical workers of the world, whose story is seldom told, and who die without odes or funeral orations to celebrate their triumph or to honor their memory. And yet it is very likely to prove in the end that William Borrow has been one of the benefactors of his race. His invention will probably save millions of property from destruction--will ward off sorrow and calamity from innumerable hearths and homes; and, by the preserving of capital from destruction, give vigor to great industrial enterprises in many future years.

William Borrow had gone to America, where he had won a prize for a new and wonderful application of steam. His death is said to have occurred as the result of mental fatigue. In this Borrow saw cause for grave complaint against the wretched English Aristocracy that forced talent out of the country by denying it employment or honour, which were all for their "connections and lick- spittles."

Some things never change.

Last night I saw a very aristocratic-looking SUV with a bumper sticker which proudly proclaimed "Doing my part to piss off the radical right."

By driving an SUV?

Hey, I'm only trying to be an interpreter, but here it is:

(I guess you have to have connections and lick-spittles to really understand . . .)