Detail of the arches and roadway. Image source: Woodward, Calvin Milton. A History of the St. Louis Bridge. St. Louis, G. I. Jones and Company, 1881, pl. 19.

Centuries of Civil Engineering

A Rare Book Exhibition Celebrating the Heritage of Civil Engineering

Cleopatra's Needle comes to New York

On July 20, 1880, a ship carrying an ancient Egyptian obelisk docked in New York to begin the final stage of an engineering project that started several months earlier in Alexandria, Egypt. The project engineer, Lieutenant Commander Henry H. Gorringe, had successfully removed the obelisk known as Cleopatra's Needle from the site where it had stood, leaning slightly toward the sea, since the time the Romans had moved it from its original site in Heliopolis. Several weeks later, on January 22, 1881, the obelisk was placed in its present position near the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Central Park – a gift of the Egyptian government to the people of the United States.

Crossing the Hudson River Railroad. Image source: Gorringe, Henry Honeychurch. Egyptian Obelisks. New York: Published by the Author, 1882, pl. 22.

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