Resplendent in the Western Sun

By HERBERT GOLD

The Golden Gate
Bridge is so beautiful—it offers such a lovely play of color, it is such a wonder of engineering and design, not to mention a wonder of location, reaching across San Francisco Bay—that it inspires artists, soothes jaded city residents, lures tourists and even tempts suicides, who have a choice of jumping while facing the open sea or the continent they intend to abandon. Proposals to erect suicide barriers stir the passions of aesthetes who treasure every bridge detail as is. So far, only minor adjustments—refining those proposal and urging bridge personnel to spot potential leapers—deter those avid for oblivion.

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Workers on a catwalk during the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge. It would be completed in 1937.

In my 50 years in San Francisco, I've learned to adore the bridge, too, although not enough to kill myself from it. Kevin Starr, a native San Franciscan and the pre- eminent contemporary chronicler of California life and culture, has now given us an ecstatic meditation on the complicated drama of the Golden Gate Bridge and a chronicle of its history.

It is perhaps fitting that Mr. Starr's prose in "Golden Gate" is drawn toward passionate expression. Bridges can have that effect. Mr. Starr reminds us that Hart Crane, in a famous poetic tribute to his bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge, recounted his feelings about its portentous symbolic meaning. The bridge for him, according to Mr. Starr, was "a triumph of engineering offering a portal into the American past." It was also an emblem of "the hope that modernity, meaning industrialism and the machine era, can be made to serve productive purposes." For Mr. Starr, the Golden Gate Bridge is more than a symbol of American reach; it is an icon, an event of steel, concrete and suspension to be worshipped for itself, "a testimony to the creativity of mankind."

This icon did not appear magically, like the gold nugget that sent San Francisco careening into the world in 1849. It was an idea hatched by various city fathers and booster groups and pushed by Joseph Strauss, an architect and engineer who came up with a design in the early 1920s. At the time as many as 50,000 commuters crossed the Golden Gate each weekday by ferry. For a city effectively walled by water, the project for a great bridge was inevitable, a thing imagined long before it could be built across the channel at the mouth of the wide, wind-rushed, tide-swept San Francisco Bay.

The original design by Strauss was a clumsy jumble of trussed steel towers and, as Mr. Starr puts it, "arrogant superstructures . . . in support of an aesthetically overwhelmed suspension system." It all amounted to "an upside-down rat trap." But over the course of a decade the design was modified to "a pure suspension bridge, the longest on the planet, 4,200 feet from tower to tower."

How did this happen? The driven egotism of Strauss fractured enough, over time, to admit the contributions of others—gifted designers, architects and engineers. (Strauss's ego was not so badly hurt in any case: He survived as the bridge project's spokesman, chief engineer and avatar.) It is a cliché that a camel is a horse designed by committee; but in this case a collaboration made the upside-down rat trap into "an almost supernal amalgam of lightness and strength." A first-time sight-seer will note its long, swooping cables and the dance that is played between concrete towers and thrusting steel, appearing and disappearing in billowing fog. And then there is the color, a reddish orange that veers toward gold at sunset.

“The Golden Gate Bridge is a global icon, a triumph of engineering, and a work of art. In American terms, it was shaped by the City Beautiful movement, the Progressive era, and the Great Depression. More mysteriously, the Bridge expresses those forces that science tells us constitute the dynamics of nature itself.” Read excerpt from "Golden Gate"

In the early planning stages, contesting forces in San Francisco objected to the very notion of a bridge. Shipping interests demanded that the vertical clearance of a bridge they really did not want be raised to 250 feet—an unneeded uplift that would add significantly to the cost: pure obstructionism. (The clearance ended up being 220 feet.) They "took their lobby to the president, secretary of war and mayor of San Francisco," Mr. Starr writes, and to anyone else they could persuaded to listen.

Reminiscent of today's politicking, a fledgling "taxpayer's Committee Against the Golden Gate Bridge Bonds" launched a newspaper and radio campaign against the bridge, arguing that it would be too expensive and was unnecessary in any case.

Naturally, the ferry companies hated the bridge idea; for them, their vessels and profits were icons enough. Even the generally progress-oriented Commonwealth Club of California objected to the bridge, as did, surprisingly, the city engineer who had joined Strauss in the original proposal. They seemed primarily worried about the expense, since San Francisco was already in debt over the recent Hetchy Hetchy water project. Again, echoes of current spending debates.

Yet the proposal for a new bridge district overwhelmingly won on the ballot in a 1930 election. Thanks for the victory were owed, in part, to the automobile lobbies and the dwellers in Marin County, the bucolic northern suburb whose residents wanted an easy path into the city. On Labor Day weekend, just ahead of the election, more than 86,000 vehicles had brought the ferry system to a constipated standstill. So thanks were owed, also, to howls of traffic rage.

Through the surrendipities of engineering proposals and revision, political struggles, money pressures (the bridge did require a special bond issue), the colliding passions of ruthless visionaries (who nevertheless were able to negotiate compromises)—all of this vividly tracked by Mr. Starr—a miracle of rightness finally came to completion in 1937.

Mr. Starr delights in the "Ballad for Americas" variety-pak parentage of ethnicities involved in the bridge's design and construction: Prominent players included an Italian, a Jew, a Scot, a Latvian, a Romanian, a Swiss and even a few "native sons of the Golden West." The financing banker A.P. Giannini asked Strauss: "How long would the bridge last?" "Forever," he answered. The deal was sealed.

Now the bridge is regularly employed by commuters from the satellite suburbs of San Francisco and by tourists and bicyclists and hikers bound for the Marin headlands or the urban pleasures of "the City," in addition to the some 1,300 souls who have used the Gold Gate Bridge as their dramatic launchpad for a death leap.

Mr. Starr, a former press secretary to Joseph Alioto when he was mayor of San Francisco, is especially fascinated by the complex network of ambition, politics and charismatic promotion that go into major urban ventures like the Golden Gate. But he is also bemused by all the obstacles that may stand in its path.

It was not only ferry- owners and fiscal worriers who opposed the bridge; some said that it would damage their unobstructed views of the Gold Gate straits or that it was dangerous, both economically and seismologically rash. The bridge was, more than anything else, change. But finally, Mr. Starr says, the result was seen to be "the most beautiful bridge ever built."

For Mr. Starr, as for Hart Crane, a bridge can also be a "portal into the American past." Before his chronicle takes us up to the modern era and its engineering feats, Mr. Starr stops to revisit early California and salute the Native Americans, the Spanish explorers and early settlers, the Chinese, the Irish, the Jews, the traders and adventurers and questing fools—including some traditional East Coasters—who early on came to populate this last stop on the way west. He traces the constant rebuilding and reimagining of a tiny outpost village on a bay of the Pacific. When it finally did arrive, the city of San Francisco came so fast that it felt as if—as a native once said—nobody came first.

I spent my own childhood in the sight of a bridge crossing the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. It was appropriate and symbolic in its own way, serving a no- nonsense, go-getting, industrial city. But after all these years out West, I've chosen to cast my vote with Mr. Starr. The Golden Gate is "American greatest bridge," if not the world's.