Kevin Starr - Golden Gate : The Life and Times of Americas Greatest Bridge

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GOLDEN
GATE

THE LIFE AND TIMES OF AMERICAS
GREATEST BRIDGE

KEVIN STARR

Copyright 2010 by Kevin Starr

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury Press, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Starr, Kevin.
Golden Gate : the life and times of Americas greatest bridge / by Kevin Starr.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-59691-534-3 (hardcover)
1. Golden Gate Bridge (San Francisco, Calif.) I. Title.
TG25.S225S74 2010
624.2'30979461dc22
2009046976

First published by Bloomsbury Press in 2010
This e-book edition published in 2010

E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-292-2

www.bloomsburypress.com

For my seven grandchildren
In years to come, may they feel the same thrill as I do
each time the Bridge comes into view.

CONTENTS

T he 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. Like the Parthenon, the Golden Gate Bridge seems Platonic in its perfection, as if the harmonies and resolutions of creation as understood by mathematics and abstract thought have been effortlessly materialized through engineering design. Although the result of engineering and art, the Golden Gate Bridge seems to be a natural, even an inevitable, entity as well, like the the final movement of Beethovens Ninth. In its American context, taken historically, the Bridge aligns itself with the thought of Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and other transcendentalists in presenting an icon of transcendence: a defiance of time pointing to more elusive realities. Were Edwards, Emerson, or the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg, a mystic thinker of great importance to the formation of American thought, alive today, they would no doubt see in the Golden Gate Bridge a fusion of material and trans-material forces, held in delicate equipoise.

For all that, the Golden Gate Bridge is a bridge. It gets you from one side of the water to the other. Regionally, it serves practical and pragmatic necessity. But here as well iconic forces are at work. Of all American regions, outside Manhattan, California, taken cumulatively, is the most impressive instance of nature rearranged through engineering. From the beginning, water had to be moved from where it was, the north, to where it was needed, elsewhere, as California invented itself through water engineering. The entire Central Valley depended upon irrigation. The port of Los Angeles was blasted by dynamite to sufficient depth. From the Gold Rush onward, most Californians lived in cities and suburbs dependent upon elaborate systems of water and, later, electrical engineering. Yet the early response of Americans in California to the Golden Gate itself was poetic. John Charles Frmont named the entrance to San Francisco Bay in honor of the Golden Horn of the Bosporus protecting the harbor of ancient Constantinople. William Keith and other American painters in California delighted in depicting it as the entrance to a brave new world of gold and cities to be. A young UC Berkeley philosophy professor by the name of Josiah Royce considered the Gate the perfect symbol of the natural grandeur but philosophical isolation of the remote province in which he found himself.

As early as the frontier era, there were daydreams of spanning the Gate, one of them coming from Joshua Norton, a madman who thought he was an emperor. The early 1920s witnessed the emergence of the grandest daydreamer of them all: Joseph Strauss, bridge-builder, Emersonian visionary, promoter extraordinaire, P. T. Barnum of public works, the Wizard of Oz behind the green curtain. In proposing a bridge, Strauss linked up with an equally emblematic figure, San Francisco city engineer Michael OShaughnessy, who was playing a defining role in reconceptualizing and rebuilding San Francisco following its destruction by earthquake and fire in April 1906. As a Progressive, OShaughnessy envisioned public works as, among other things, a redemptive enterprise. Public works improved moral tone. In the decades leading up to the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge, Progressives had been busy completing California, rearranging it so as better to serve an emergent society. From this perspective, the Golden Gate Bridge and its sister structure crossing the Bay to Oakland constituted the last and greatest engineering masterpieces of this post-earthquake Progressive program.

The Bridge, however, had to evolve out of the political process. The Southern Pacific did not want it because it threatened Southern Pacific ferry operations on San Francisco Bay that each workday brought into the Ferry Building at the foot of the Embarcadero some fifty thousand commuters, making it the busiest terminal outside of Charing Cross Station, London. The Navy did not want it. It could be shelled from offshore during wartime and collapse, blocking entrance and egress to the harbor. The environmentalists did not want it. The Bridge seemed an arrogant intrusion on nature. Yet the established governments of the counties ringing San Francisco Bay, together with Del Norte County on the Oregon border, wanted it. Such a bridge would open the Redwood Empire to the north and, more important, further consolidate the counties of the Bay, especially the North Bay counties, with the Bay Area itself, where nearly half the population of California was then living.

A political battle ensued, pitting the Progressive impulse to complete California through public works against other interests and a generalized resistance to change. The Great Depression affected the outcome. Public works provided one of the leading ways Americans were combating unemployment during this era. Yet the Golden Gate Bridge was not a federal project, as was the San FranciscoOakland Bay Bridge. The Bridge resulted, rather, from a localized, county-driven process; and a private entity, the Bank of America, bought the bonds, bringing into the genesis of the Bridge yet another iconic American, A. P. Giannini, one of the most notable bankers in American history.

Joseph Strauss was a great promoter, but the bridge he initially proposed was a clumsy monstrosity. The Golden Gate could not be defiled with such ugliness. Strauss eventually came to recognize this fact, however reluctantly, and he retained the best bridge designers in the nation to come up with a better solution. The result: engineering as high art, and high art as engineering. And then the color! International Orange, it was called, at once a natural color and a color highly suggestive of artifice, capable of blending into all the hues and colors of the site and the pageant of wind, fog, and maritime weather moving through the channel. Designs complete, bonds sold, supervising engineer Russ Cone and his construction crews got to work. Not since the Brooklyn Bridge was built more than a half century earlier had bridge-builders faced such a challenge. Americans build things, and the construction of the Golden Gate Bridge constitutes an epic achievement of American labor. It is a powerful storythe sinking of the piers, the erection of towers, the spinning and emplacement of cables. Eleven workers lost their lives, ten on one day. Could such a structure be built, one is tempted to ask, without some form of sacrifice? The ancients would have answered No! The Golden Gate Bridge represented a defiance of nature as well as a tribute to it, and a certain score had to be settled.