Being a devoted lover of ferries and watercraft, I’ve always had an ambivalent feeling for bridges.
San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge radiates a spiritual pull and power that has often been celebrated in prose and song. The most current example being Kevin Starr’s masterfully written Golden Gate, which maintains that it may be “the most beautiful bridge ever built.” Photo by Joel Williams
By Paul Duclos
Published: August, 2010
The Bay Bridge with its awkward and doomed east span is remembered by many for failing to fully stand up during last century’s “other” earthquake (of 1989). The Richmond Bridge, meanwhile, meanders uncertainly between the sad confines of San Quentin and the quietly sinister industrial edge of Point Richmond. And the San Mateo Bridge—that ugly, nearly submerged slab linking Hayward to the peninsula—would be laughable if it were not so dangerous.
But then there’s the Golden Gate, regarded by millions as heroic, iconic, great. I live near its southern entrance and drive across it at least once week, yet still marvel at its mystifying beauty and structural integrity. It radiates a spiritual pull and power that is undeniable, and has often been celebrated in prose and song. The most current example of this is Kevin Starr’s masterfully written Golden Gate (Bloomsbury, 215 pages, $23), which maintains that it may be “the most beautiful bridge ever built.”
In this slender and elegant book, Starr explains how the storied span immediately took its place among the world’s greatest engineering and architectural feats. Its distinctive Art Deco towers, landscape-friendly International Orange and dramatic setting combined for a thrilling picture, perfectly symbolizing America’s Far West regional capital.
The bridge had many godfathers, most prominently the city engineer who first called for its construction, the local chieftain who cleared the political path, the progressive banker who financed it and especially Joseph Strauss, the engineer/entrepreneur whose own design—“an upside-down rat trap,” said one opponent—gave way to the plan created by the brilliant team of consulting engineers, designers and architects he assembled.
Starr also notes that among its opponents were members of the ferry community:
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 50,000 commuters, making it the busiest terminal outside of Charing Cross Station, London.
Starr also observes that the environmentalists did not want it, as it seemed “an arrogant intrusion on nature.”
But what we have, says the author, is a legitimate West Coast counterpart to the Statue of Liberty, “announcing, in terms of American Art Deco, American achievement and the higher purposes of American culture.”
And it does this with its own element of historical narrative, subtly contained in the Art Deco stylization of its towers played off against repetitive cables descending into a reversed arch against an interplay of city, sea, and sky. Lest this all sound too positive, even triumphant, it must be noted that the Golden Gate Bridge, almost immediately, became, literally, the springboard, the platform, for human tragedy, beginning with the great accident of mid-February 1937 that claimed the lives of ten workers. Quite soon, the Bridge became the venue of choice for suicide throughout the greater Bay Area. By 2009 some 1300 people had ended their lives via the Bridge. What do these seven decades of death by suicide mean? Why have the guardians of the Golden Gate Bridge been reluctant to, as they put it, mar the beauty of the Bridge with suicide-prevention nets or fences? Is this connection of the Bridge to death preventable or inevitable; and if it is inevitable, what does that mean as far as the iconic status of the Bridge is concerned? Here, in any event, where the American continent gives out, the Golden Gate Bridge continues to draw those who have lost what the English novelist Evelyn Waugh has described as the unequal struggle with life.
And admittedly, when opting for the ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito, my gaze is always directed to Gate, rather than to the City’s skyline. To love both the Bridge and the channel it towers above is not such a reach after all.
