Photos: A look at the Golden Gate Bridge
SAN FRANCISCO — The Golden Gate Bridge, the symbol of San Francisco, is not on the Interstate System. It carries U.S. 101 across the bay.
On June 14, 1846, Captain John Frémont declared California’s independence from Mexico. He had no right to do so, but he nevertheless raised the banner of the Bear Flag Republic at Sonoma, north of San Francisco Bay. He and his supporters then crossed the bay to spike the Mexican cannons at the Presidio in San Francisco. (Kit Carson, while boarding one of Frémont’s longboats, said, “I’d ruther chase a grizzly bear in the mountings than ride in this thang!”) Having spiked the cannons, the men returned to Sonoma, where Frémont charted the trip. At the mile-wide entrance to San Francisco Bay, he noted: “Chrysophylae or Golden Gate.” In his 1886 memoirs, he dropped the Greek and proclaimed, “I named it GOLDEN GATE.”
Although informal ferry service across the bay existed as early as the 1820′s, regular service began in the 1840′s as part of an effort to supply water to the city from the springs at Sausalito. The tank boats would carry passengers for $2.
Following the Gold Rush boom that began in 1849, speculators realized that the Marin County land north of the bay would increase in value in direct proportion to its accessibility to the city. The Sausalito Land and Ferry Company began its ferry service, aboard the Princess, a sidewheeler, on May 10, 1868. It made five round trips a day. Eventually, the ferry service came under the control of the Southern Pacific Railroad.
The idea of spanning the Golden Gate took root in 1916, although the idea had been considered earlier. An ex-engineering student, James Wilkins, was working as a journalist with the San Francisco Bulletin when he kicked off the idea that year by calling for a suspension bridge with a center span of 3,000 feet, nearly twice the length of any in existence.
San Francisco’s city engineer, Michael M. O’Shaughnessy, thought the bridge would cost up to $100 million, but he began asking bridge engineers whether they could do it for less. Joseph Strauss, a 5-foot tall Cincinnati-born Chicagoan, knew he could. He was an engineer who also wrote poetry–so he was used to dreaming. For his graduate thesis, he had designed a bridge to link North America and Asia across the 55-mile Bering Strait. He would later write:
Our world of today . . . revolves completely around things which at one time couldn’t be done because they were supposedly beyond the limits of human endeavor. Don’t be afraid to dream!
The first design Strauss came up with-steel-girdered sections on either end with a suspension span in the middle- was decried as a horror. The proposal, and Strauss’ estimate that it could be built for $17 million, led to controversy while officials and the public debated whether to pursue the idea of a span, whatever the cost or design.
Today, looking back, it is strange to think that this most beautiful of all bridges, this bridge that is universally recognized as the symbol of the city, faced bitter opposition from determined foes. It took several favorable court rulings, an enabling act from the State legislature, two Federal hearings prior to approval from the U.S. Department of War (which had long feared that any bridge across San Francisco Bay would hinder navigation), a guarantee that local workers would have first crack at the jobs, and a mass boycott of the ferry service operated by the Southern Pacific Railroad (which had opposed the bridge because it would end the company’s monopoly on cross-bay traffic). It also took a new design.
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