ABSTRACT
The most imaginative of all the illustrated weeklies—equally the most scurrilous, sensationalistic and disreputable—was the wonderful, the incomparable National Police Gazette. The Gazette eschewed respectability in favor of the lurid and the strange, and, in so doing, brought as much human drama to the bridge as Frank Leslie’s or Harper’s had brought to the construction. With purple prose and graphic pictures, the Gazette treated life on the span as a bizarre soap opera filled with odd characters, dark deeds, and the occasional moment of pure human wonder.
