The Brooklyn Bridge appears at night as a web of light and steel. At the center one of its stone towers rises with its paired pointed arches, while the cables fan out as pale beams cutting across deep blues and blacks. Skyscrapers loom at upper left and right, lit openings glow beneath the roadway, and a red glow burns near the bottom. Joseph Stella, who came to the United States from Italy in 1896, was drawn to the bridge from his first sight of it and called it the shrine containing all the efforts of the new civilization of America.

The Yale University Art Gallery notes that he only put his feelings on canvas after moving to Brooklyn and living in the bridge's shadow, recalling many nights standing alone in the middle of the bridge. He painted this canvas, over two meters tall, in 1919–20. Yale calls it his best-known and most moving tribute to the power and majesty of America's industrial landscape, and he returned to the bridge many times. In 1920 the collector Katharine Sophie Dreier bought it from the Bourgeois Galleries in New York; it later passed to the Société Anonyme, which gave it to Yale in 1941.

It is in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven.