The men who said it could not be built had respectable arguments. The Golden Gate strait — named Chrysopylae, "golden gate", by the explorer John C. Frémont in 1846, two years before California found any actual gold — is a mile-wide breach in the coastal hills through which the Pacific pours in and out of San Francisco Bay. Tidal currents surge through it with the force of a great river, fog erases the channel for days at a stretch, gales funnel between the headlands, and the seabed shelves away into deep, cold water. Add the ferry companies whose monopoly a bridge would ruin, a War Department fretting that a downed span might bottle up the fleet, and eminent engineers who pronounced the site impossible, and you have the settled opinion of the early 1920s: the Golden Gate would never be bridged.
Joseph Strauss, a Chicago bridge-builder of towering ambition and modest height, spent more than a decade proving that opinion wrong — though not, in truth, by designing the bridge himself. His first proposal was a lumpen hybrid of cantilever and suspension spans that critics likened to an upside-down rat trap. The structure that finally rose owed its mathematics chiefly to Charles Ellis, a Greek-quoting engineering professor whom Strauss dismissed mid-project and largely erased from the official record, and to Leon Moisseiff, the era's leading theorist of slender suspension bridges. The Art Deco towers and the celebrated colour came from the consulting architect Irving Morrow, who saw the reddish protective primer on the delivered steel and argued that it flattered both the fog and the Marin headlands. The US Navy had lobbied for black with yellow stripes, the better to be seen by shipping; Morrow's choice entered history instead as International Orange.
The money was nearly as difficult as the engineering. Washington paid nothing: the bridge was financed by a $35 million bond issue that voters of the surrounding counties approved in 1930, in the teeth of the Depression — and the bonds only moved because Amadeo Giannini, the San Francisco founder of the Bank of America, agreed to buy the first tranche when nobody else would. Work began in January 1933. The Marin tower rose quickly; the San Francisco tower had to be planted offshore in open water, behind a concrete fender that divers built in the brief slack minutes between tides.
The net and the Halfway-to-Hell Club
High-steel construction in that era ran on a grim rule of thumb: roughly one worker killed for every million dollars spent. On a $35 million job, that arithmetic implied dozens of funerals. Strauss instead made the site a showcase of safety. Hard hats were compulsory — one of the first big projects to insist on them — men caught stunting on the steel were sacked on the spot, and, most famously, a vast trapeze-style safety net was slung beneath the advancing deck at a cost of around $130,000. The net caught nineteen falling men, who formed a fraternity with the finest name in construction history: the Halfway-to-Hell Club. For almost the entire build the death toll stood at one, a worker killed by a falling derrick in October 1936. Then, on 17 February 1937, with the bridge only months from completion, a travelling work platform tore loose and ripped through the net, carrying ten men into the strait. The final toll was eleven — tragic, and still far below what the era expected.
The bridge opened on time and under budget. On 27 May 1937, Pedestrian Day, some 200,000 people walked, roller-skated and tap-danced across; the following day President Franklin Roosevelt pressed a telegraph key in the White House and the cars rolled. The main span, at 1,280 metres, was the longest in the world and stayed so until New York's Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge overtook it in 1964; the towers, 227 metres above the water, were the tallest on any bridge yet built. Strauss, exhausted, died barely a year later, leaving a statue, a triumphant poem and a long argument over credit that historians eventually settled largely in Ellis's favour.
One legend deserves its footnote. Guides love to say the bridge is painted continuously from end to end, the crews finishing just in time to start again. The record is more prosaic: the original paint system lasted decades, and today's painters simply touch up corrosion wherever the salt air finds it, forever. That, in its way, is the truer story. The Golden Gate was never conquered; it was answered — with a net, a colour, and a span that made the impossible look inevitable.
Quiz nuggets
- The main span of 1,280 metres was the world's longest from 1937 until New York's Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge opened in 1964.
- A safety net saved 19 workers, who formed the "Halfway-to-Hell Club"; 11 men died in total, ten of them when a work platform fell through the net in February 1937.
- The colour, International Orange, was championed by architect Irving Morrow; the US Navy had wanted black with yellow stripes.
- John C. Frémont named the strait Chrysopylae — "golden gate" — in 1846, two years before the California gold rush.
- Chief engineer Joseph Strauss took the credit, but the key calculations were by Charles Ellis, who went unrecognised for decades.