Chapter eight places the spectator just south of the Manhattan side of the Bridge. In 1921 the Bridge had been completed thirty-eight years before, and its "oldness" is emphasized in this drawing by the presence of a horse and carriage – barely perceptible in the dark shadow that the Bridge casts. The carriage’s antique appearance is made even more striking by the fact that the preceding drawing in the book, "Wall Street," had depicts several cars which, in 1921, had represented the latest trends in automobile design.

"The Old Bridge" is the second of the books two studies of the Brooklyn Bridge. Where the first, "Looking West on Brooklyn Bridge," directs attention away from the Bridge (in order to problematize the view of the city which the Bridge affords), this chapter focuses attention on the bridge, but situates it in a nineteenth century context; skyscrapers and automobiles are shut out of this drawing. The chapter is in this sense proposes a new (but finally an equally hopeless) solution to the problems of visual representation Marcus raises in "Looking West on Brooklyn Bridge." It shows us the most recognizable features of the Bridge’s design – its stone arches – but returns us to a time when they could be seen for the first time. Where chapter four defamiliarizes the Bridge by preventing our identifying it, chapter eight presents the familiar Bridge in a way that asks us to imagine it as unfamiliar.

The chapter is ultimately unable to defamiliarize the Bridge, however, without explicitly locating itself in the twentieth century. While the drawing asks the reader to imagine the Bridge as if it were new, the prose asks us to recognize it as old. Marcus addressed himself specifically to "those who have known it from its beginning," and since that beginning, the Bridge was treated as a symbol of modern engineering’s triumph over geographical limitations. Most people since the late nineteenth century had regarded the Bridge as a modern achievement, but this regard had itself become something of an antique. To call the Bridge "old" in this context helps to see it anew, insofar as to see the bridge as a part of a bygone era is to see it as no previous era had. The chapter’s attempt to present the Bridge as a structure firmly rooted in the nineteenth century results only in reinforcing the reader’s awareness of the great distance between the modern era and the one reenacted.