Daily News from New York, New York • 338

IN to ROOKLYN With GEORGE JAMES to CI Poets Caught in Span's Silky lVcb GOING INTO BROOKLYN from the Brooklyn Bridge, you are greeted by the yellow watchtower ''An nouncing- Jehovah's Kingdom, with time and temperature thrown in: 4:02 p.m., 40 degrees. Old tenements sit in the shadow of high rises and off to the left squat industrial mammoths with tiers of multipaned windows speaking positively of "Space Available. Going into Manhattan, vou are eye-level with windows of newer apartment and office buildings, aluminum air-conditioning, intestines of buildings under construction, and a cigar-smoking if 2L 18 All MARTIN'S STORES OPEN LATE THURSDAY NIGHT Y' Drizzle-or-Dry Coats I I Any-weather shelter in shower- I I shedding blends of machine 1 washable polyester and cotton. Treated with ZePel rain-and- rk sa'n TO resist raindrops, I oil. and such.

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Both by Misty Harbor. All-Weather Coats Third Floor After all these years and all the bad jokes the Brooklyn Bridge is an official New York City landmark. pigeon keeper on the roof of an old building dwarfed by Manhattan towers. Then the bridge presents you to City Hall and the Municipal Building. You've made the crossing from God's country into the land of Caesar.

Occasionally, Caesar (city, state, feds) ask tribute in the form of proposed tolls on the Brooklyn Bridge and other East River crossings to save the (25-cent, 35-cent, 50-cent, $1) subway fare or end pollution in Manhattan by dumping it around the toll booths on the BrooklynQueens side. The other day, however, the City of New York chose not to seek tribute, but render it. It designated the Brooklyn Bridge a city landmark (following the federal government which in 1964 declared it a national historic monument). A plaque was placed on the Manhattan end, humbly calling it "the most famous bridge in the world," which is okay for the people of Brooklyn, many of whom love the bridge and at the same time (especially older residents) see it as having brought the end of Brooklyn as a sovereign city apart from Manhattan. Contrast Provides Excitement "It not only represents a triumph of civil engineering but is one of the city's most enduringly beautiful structures.

The contrast between the massive stone pylons and the delicate tracery of the suspension cables dramatizes visually their respective roles in carrying this mighty span from shore to shore," the plaque says. Another plaque above it, placed in 1956 by the. American Institute of Steel Construction, sees in it, "the adaptability of the steel bridge." Everybody wants to get in on the actr which is okay too, sinee the bridge belongs to everyone. Every outlander who ever set out to conquer the big town must have gotten the giddy feeling he actually might when crossing toward the lights of Manhattan buildings made crystal palaces by the night the city lay spread out before him. Everyone, from the boy who scrawls his name ('Yellow Tiger) on one of its thick cables, the foot-weary jogger, the old baba weighted down by her shopping bags, the school children with books, the businessman with his future success in his briefcase, lovers, junkies, crazies, the rubes who as folklore has it bought the bridge all have had their personal visions.

As poet Harvey Shapiro wrote: The BridgeStill stands Getting ancient With its freight of poetry." Symbol for a Masterpiece Novelist Thomas Wolfe's gargantuan figure strained the walkway on his nocturnal excusions and from the bridge's sweep he wrote of "joy and ecstasy." For poet Hart Crane, who lived on Columbia Heights, it was the most beautiful bridge in the world, a reflection of modem inventiveness. He took it as the symbol for his lyric masterpiece, "The Bridge." The work was to be a synthesis of American history and the future of both America and its individuals. In the introductory poem, "To Brooklyn Bridge," he saw the bridge as man's desire to rise above ordinary experience and win spiritual fulfillment, says Vincent Quinn in Twayne's U.S. Author series A holy thing, uplifting to the spirit," Quinn says. The plaque talks of John A.

Roebling, it's designer, who died of iockiaw at the beginning of the project. His son, Washington, who took on his father's work, became incapacitated with the bends during construction, and was aided by his strong wife, Emily, in its completion in 1383. Promenade Is Poetic The city celebrated the bridge's 90th birthday in May 1973. More significantly in the long run, a masterful, epic history, "The Great Bridse," by David McCullough, was published in 1972. So in 1972, a Brooklyn poet named Daniela Gioseffi led "A Brooklyn Bridge Poetry Walk" during wjich the poets whose works were read included Shapiro, Crane, Walt Whitman, Federico Garcia Lorca, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Ms.

Gioseffi. One of her images has the bridge spanning "Whitman's age of hopeto our age of anxiety and despair." For Crane, it may have represented the promise of America, but for many a troubled soul, it represented the end, as plummeting to the concrete-like water below, they took their dreams with them. Steve Erodie supposedly survived the jump, as did Tarzan In he person of Johnny Weissmuller (on flm'anyway)-'' And Crane he jumped off a boat and drowned atseaj Vt- Brooklyn (212) 875-3100; Garden City (516 747-4300; Babylon (516) 661-4300; Huntington- (516) 42 M300r Smith Havan'Malt 516) 724-7400 USE. MARTIN'S ACCOUNT PR, CHARGE FOR ALL YOUR PURCHASES..