Golden Gate Bridge

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Golden Gate Bridge spans a strait one mile wide where San Francisco Bay meets the Pacific Ocean. Many experts insisted it could never be built. They pointed to a channel 6,700 feet across, with water 372 feet deep at the center, swirling tides, and frequent strong winds. Blinding fogs and ferocious winds, they said, would defeat both construction and operation. The strait had no fixed crossing, only boats. A ferry service had run there since as early as 1820, and San Francisco remained the largest American city still served primarily by ferry boats. Without a permanent link, the city grew slower than the national average. Who would attempt a bridge across such hostile water, and at what human cost? Why did the man whose name became attached to it spend more than a decade fighting lawsuits and skeptics before a single cable was strung? And how did a structure first rejected as ugly become described as possibly the most beautiful, certainly the most photographed, bridge in the world? The American Society of Civil Engineers counts it among the Wonders of the Modern World. Its story begins with a 1916 newspaper article and a $100 million estimate that nearly killed the idea before it started.

• 2. The Hidden Designers

  ›

  Joseph Strauss arrived at the project with a confident pitch and a thin resume for the task. For his graduate thesis he had designed a 55-mile railroad bridge across the Bering Strait. He had completed some 400 drawbridges, most of them inland, and nothing on the scale of the Golden Gate. His first drawings showed a massive cantilever on each side of the strait joined by a central suspension segment, which he promised to build for $17 million. That design was rejected, chiefly because it was unacceptable to look at.

  Leon Moisseiff, the engineer of the Manhattan Bridge in New York City, conceived and championed the suspension design that replaced it. Moisseiff produced the basic structural work and introduced his deflection theory, in which a thin, flexible roadway flexes in the wind. That flexing transmits forces through the suspension cables to the towers and greatly reduces stress. The theory held here. A later Moisseiff design, the original Tacoma Narrows Bridge, collapsed in a strong windstorm soon after completion, undone by an unexpected aeroelastic flutter.

  Charles Alton Ellis did the technical and theoretical labor that made the bridge stand. A Greek scholar and mathematician, he once taught engineering at the University of Illinois without holding an engineering degree, then earned one in civil engineering before this project. Working remotely with Moisseiff, he served as principal engineer and also designed a bridge within a bridge, a graceful steel arch over Fort Point. That pre-Civil War masonry fort was already considered worthy of preservation, so Ellis carried the roadway over it rather than tearing it down. In November 1931, Strauss fired Ellis and replaced him with a former subordinate, Clifford Paine, ostensibly for spending too much on telegrams to Moisseiff. Ellis, unable to find other work during the Depression, kept laboring 70 hours a week without pay and turned in ten volumes of hand calculations.

  Irving Morrow, a little-known residential architect, shaped what the public actually sees. He designed the towers, the lighting scheme, and the Art Deco tower decorations, streetlights, railings, and walkways. He also chose the famous International Orange color, beating out other options including a US Navy suggestion of black and yellow stripes for visibility. Strauss, with an eye toward self-promotion and posterity, downplayed all of them and had himself credited as the man most responsible for the bridge. Recognition came late. In May 2007, the Golden Gate Bridge District issued a report on 70 years of stewardship and decided to give Ellis major credit for the design.

• 3. Fighting For The Bridge

  ›

  James Wilkins, a former engineering student, made the proposal that finally took hold in a 1916 San Francisco Bulletin article. San Francisco's City Engineer pegged the cost at $100 million and called it impractical for the time, then asked bridge engineers whether it could be done for less. The opposition that followed came from every direction. The Department of War worried the bridge would interfere with ship traffic. The US Navy feared a collision or sabotage could block the entrance to one of its main harbors. Unions demanded that local workers be favored for the jobs.

  Southern Pacific Railroad posed the fiercest resistance. The company ran the Southern Pacific-Golden Gate Ferries, the largest ferry operation in the world, formed by a 1929 merger. Its automobile ferries had grown very profitable and important to the regional economy. Seeing the bridge as competition, Southern Pacific filed a lawsuit that triggered a mass boycott of its own ferry service. The ferry crossing from the Hyde Street Pier in San Francisco to the Sausalito Ferry Terminal took about 20 minutes and cost $1.00 per vehicle, a price cut before 1937 to compete with the bridge.

  The name came before the structure. M.M. O'Shaughnessy, San Francisco's city engineer, used it with Strauss when the project was first discussed in 1917. It became official with the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District Act, passed by the state legislature in 1923, creating a special district to design, build, and finance the crossing. San Francisco and most North Coast counties joined the district. Humboldt County stayed out, its residents opposed to the bridge and the traffic it would bring. In May 1924, Colonel Herbert Deakyne, acting for the Secretary of War, held a hearing and approved the transfer of federal land needed for the structure and its roads.

• 4. Money From A Crash

  ›

  The Wall Street Crash of 1929 nearly sank the financing before construction. The Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District, incorporated in 1928, could not raise the funds, so it lobbied for a $30 million bond measure. Voters in the affected counties approved the bonds in November 1930, against a construction budget of $27 million. Even then the district could not sell the bonds until 1932. Amadeo Giannini, founder of the San Francisco-based Bank of America, agreed to buy the entire issue to help the local economy. The last of the construction bonds were retired in 1971, with $35 million in principal and nearly $39 million in interest raised entirely from bridge tolls.

• 5. Building Above The Water

  ›

  Construction began on the 5th of January 1933, and the project ran ahead of schedule and $1.3 million under budget, at a cost of more than $35 million. McClintic-Marshall Construction Co., a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel, carried out the work, founded by Howard H. McClintic and Charles D. Marshall, both of Lehigh University. Strauss oversaw daily construction. A graduate of the University of Cincinnati, he placed a brick from his alma mater's demolished McMicken Hall in the south anchorage before the concrete was poured.

  Strauss innovated a movable safety net strung beneath the men, which saved many lives. Nineteen workers caught by the nets formed the Half Way to Hell Club. The safety record held until the 17th of February 1937, when a scaffold secured by undersized bolts gave way with twelve men on it and broke through the net. Ten died in that fall, part of eleven men killed during the project; two of the twelve survived the 200-foot drop into the water.

  The bridge opened to the public on the 27th of May 1937, with a celebration that began at 6:00 a.m. and ran for a week. The day before vehicles were allowed, 200,000 people crossed on foot or on roller skates. Donald Bryan, a student sprinter from San Francisco Junior College, was the first to make it across end to end. Mayor Angelo Rossi rode the ferry to Marin, then crossed in a motorcade past three ceremonial barriers, the last a blockade of beauty queens who made Strauss present the bridge to the Highway District before letting him pass. An official song, There's a Silver Moon on the Golden Gate, marked the event, and Strauss wrote a poem now on the bridge, The Mighty Task is Done. The next day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pushed a button in Washington, D.C. to signal the official start of vehicle traffic at noon. The Round House Café, an Art Deco diner by Alfred Finnila, was completed in 1938 at the southeastern end.

• 6. Measured In Wire And Rivets

  ›

  Each main cable holds 27,572 strands of wire, and the total length of galvanized steel wire in both cables is estimated at 80,000 miles. The weight of the roadway hangs from 250 pairs of vertical suspender ropes attached to those two cables, which pass over the towers and anchor in concrete at each end. Each of the two towers carries roughly 600,000 rivets. The main span stretches 4,200 feet and the total height reaches 746 feet, with clearance above high water averaging 220 feet.

  At its opening the bridge was both the longest and the tallest suspension bridge in the world. It held the length record until 1964 and the height record until 1998, though its towers were surpassed in 1993 by the Mezcala Bridge in Mexico. The total length from abutment to abutment is 8,981 feet. Since 1964 its main span has been passed by twenty bridges, leaving it the second-longest main span in the Americas, behind the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge in New York City. In the 1960s, planners studied running Bay Area Rapid Transit tracks across the bridge to Marin County. A 1961 consultant study found the suspension section could support a new lower deck, but the bridge's own engineer Clifford Paine disagreed, and an engineering review board concluded in April 1962 that it was not advisable.

• 7. Keeping It Standing

  ›

  On the 1st of December 1951, a windstorm exposed swaying and rolling instabilities and forced the bridge to close. In 1953 and 1954, crews added lateral and diagonal bracing connecting the lower chords of the two side trusses, stiffening the deck against the kind of twisting that had destroyed the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940. Salt carried by fog later reached the rebar in the original concrete deck, causing corrosion and spalling. From 1982 to 1986, that deck was replaced in 747 sections with steel orthotropic panels 40 percent lighter and stronger, over 401 nights without fully closing the roadway, at a cost over $68 million.

  The San Andreas Fault sits close enough to put the bridge at risk. Once thought able to survive any foreseeable earthquake, it was actually vulnerable to total collapse if the supports on the 320-foot arch over Fort Point failed. A $392 million program set out to let it endure such an event with only minimal, repairable damage. Engineers from Balfour Beatty and Enerpac used a custom electro-hydraulic synchronous lift system to build temporary support towers and shift the loads onto them, all without disrupting commuter traffic.

  New railing slats installed starting in 2019 on the west side gave the bridge an unexpected voice. More flexible than the old ones, they were chosen to raise the structure's wind tolerance to 100 mph. In June 2020, residents across San Francisco and Marin Counties began hearing a humming noise, described as eerie and as a shrill screeching sound. The district found that wind passing through the slats at 22 mph produces a low tone between 280 and 700 hertz, while wind at 27 mph at an angle produces a higher 1.1 kilohertz pitch. An independent analysis of a 2020 recording identified frequencies of 354, 398, 439, and 481 hertz, matching the notes F4, G4, A4, and B4, an F Lydian Tetrachord. On the 16th of December 2021, the district approved a fix: 12,000 U-shaped clips with rubber dampers, costing $450,000, expected to cut the noise by 75 percent.

• 8. Color, Sound, And Survival

  ›

  International orange, an orange vermilion, was chosen by Irving Morrow because it complements the natural surroundings and stands out in fog. The bridge first wore red lead primer and a lead-based topcoat. In the mid-1960s a program stripped that and repainted with zinc silicate primer and vinyl topcoats; since 1990, acrylic topcoats have been used for air quality, and 38 painters now keep up the work where corrosion sets in. In 1999 the bridge ranked fifth on the American Institute of Architects' List of America's Favorite Architecture.

  Fog on the strait, common in summer, can swallow the whole bridge and endanger mariners. A system of five air-powered foghorns was set up in 1937 and still runs, its pattern and pitch regulated by the Coast Guard. Two horns at the base of the south tower, 40 feet above high water, point west and east and sound a 2-second blast every 18 seconds in a low tone. Three horns at the midspan, dating to 1985, produce two 1-second blasts every 36 seconds in a higher, dual tone, and ships steer by them. On the 18th of October 2013, around 2:00 a.m., one horn sounded continuously for nearly an hour because of a malfunctioning relay before being disconnected.

  For decades the Golden Gate Bridge was the most used suicide site in the world. Jumpers fell for four seconds and hit the water at around 75 mph, most dying from impact trauma. After years of debate and an estimated more than 2,000 deaths, work on prevention nets began in April 2017. The taut marine-grade stainless-steel nets extend 20 feet from the walkway, sit 20 feet below it, and are designed to cause serious but not fatal injury. Installation, first estimated at four years and over $200 million, finished in January 2024, exceeding the budget by $17 million. The results convinced former skeptics. By the 21st of November 2024, deaths by suicide for the year stood at eight, down from an average of 33.5, and thwarted attempts through October had fallen from an annual average of 200 to 106.