The fascinating history of the Golden Gate Bridge

An American dream

Spanning the slim strait that connects San Francisco Bay with the waters of the Pacific Ocean, California’s Golden Gate Bridge is one of the state’s – and the country’s – most recognizable landmarks. This behemoth of concrete and orange steel has been open to the public for nearly 90 years, weathering the Great Depression, earthquakes, overcrowding, toxic paint jobs, and more in its long and colorful history.

Click through this gallery to discover the fascinating facts, stories, and secrets behind the world’s most photographed bridge…

Whose idea was it anyway?

British-born Joshua Norton (pictured) is believed to have been the first person to publicly call for a bridge to be built across San Francisco Bay. After arriving in San Francisco during the California Gold Rush, Norton made and then lost a small fortune in real estate and commodities, filing for bankruptcy in the 1850s.

Having lost all his money and probably his mind, Norton proclaimed himself Emperor of the United States in 1869, with one of his 'official acts' being to order the construction of a suspension bridge between Oakland and San Francisco.

Getting the ball rolling

His title was fictitious and he had no power, but he ultimately got his wish with the Bay Bridge, which opened more than five decades after his death in 1936. In 1872, renowned railway tycoon Charles Crocker proposed plans and estimated costs for a bridge over the Golden Gate Strait (pictured here circa 1868), but these yielded no immediate action.

It wasn’t until James Wilkins, a structural engineer and editor for the San Francisco Call Bulletin newspaper, campaigned for a bridge in print in 1916 that people really began to take note.

Finding the right man for the job

Wilkins' push for a bridge piqued the interest of San Francisco city engineer Michael O'Shaughnessy, who arranged a sound survey of the channel bottom, but several of the engineers he consulted speculated that it could cost upward of $100 million ($2.8bn today). The exception was the experienced Chicago-based engineer Joseph Strauss, who was chosen as chief engineer for the Golden Gate Bridge thanks to his more modest $25 to 30 million proposal.

The bridge’s final design was a team effort

Strauss scrapped his original plan for the bridge – a hybrid cantilever-suspension design described as "an upside-down rat trap" by one critic – after his colleagues voiced concerns over wind-worthiness, construction time and cost. Instead, plans for an all-suspension bridge were drawn up by consulting engineer Leon Moisseiff, the man behind the Manhattan Bridge.

The bridge’s Art-Deco towers and famous orange finish are the work of consulting architect Irving Morrow, while Charles Ellis was the primary structural designer (although he was fired shortly before construction began).

Why was the Golden Gate Bridge needed?

Before the Golden Gate and Bay bridges opened in the mid-1930s, the only direct way to travel from San Francisco to neighboring Marin County was by ferry, and nearly 123,000 crossings were made per year. San Francisco emerged as one of America’s fastest-growing cities in the late-19th century, but its poor road links to the north posed a problem for the city when automobiles became popular and affordable. The development of the bridge over the strait was meant to facilitate quicker, easier, and more reliable travel.

'The bridge that couldn’t be built'

Naysayers were very vocal when the Golden Gate Bridge was proposed, believing it was an impossible feat. Many maintained that it simply couldn’t be built – the area’s notoriously strong winds and pea-soup fog would hinder construction, while the volatile currents of the strait's deep waters would make things even worse. Against the odds, the landmark bridge was completed and has only closed three times due to high winds in its history. The construction was so challenging and controversial that some experts doubt it could happen today.

The proposal didn’t go down well with everyone

The bridge eventually garnered widespread support, mostly for economic reasons, but there were some that sought to block the project from happening. A number of business owners and civic leaders, in addition to the channel’s ferry operators, opposed the planned bridge, believing that it would impede shipping operations and become a blight on the bay’s natural beauty. The devastating San Francisco earthquake of 1906 was also fresh in people’s minds – how would the colossal structure withstand a similarly powerful tremor?

The military had a different vision for the bridge

The US War Department, who owned the land on both sides of the Golden Gate Strait, also initially objected. There were concerns that the bridge could be bombed, leading it to collapse and trap ships in San Francisco Bay, while the navy also expressed worries about the bridge’s visibility in the city’s notorious fog. The military eventually approved the bridge – but wanted it painted in bright, clashing stripes to ensure it could easily be seen from the water and the air.

So how did it end up orange?

Needless to say, the military didn’t get its way. When the steel to build the Golden Gate Bridge arrived in San Francisco, it was coated in a warm orange-red shade of primer that Irving Morrow saw as the perfect compromise. The color was never intended to be permanent, but Morrow found it to be both highly visible and sympathetic to the natural hues of the strait’s cliffs, as well as a strong contrast with the water and sky. The paint color was eventually dubbed 'international orange' and is also used on the suits of NASA astronauts.

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Local people helped finance construction

On May 25, 1923, California passed a law creating a designated legal district to manage the logistics of the bridge – the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District. This also ensured that the counties affected by the proposals had an active voice in proceedings. In 1930, these voters approved the issue of $35 million ($639m today) in bonds – this would pay for the bridge but also required them to put their homes, farms and businesses up as collateral. In the midst of the Great Depression, this three-to-one vote was a resounding show of confidence.

Construction begins

After years of dreaming and scheming, financial roadblocks and legal battles, construction on the Golden Gate Bridge finally commenced on  January 5, 1933. Offering an opportunity for steady employment in the thick of the Great Depression, out-of-work cab drivers, clerks and farmers joined the workforce as ironworkers and cement mixers. The first job was to excavate 3.25 million cubic feet of earth for the bridge’s 12-story-tall anchorages, which the suspension cables would connect to.

It was complex and dangerous work

As predicted by some of the project’s critics, construction was hampered by rapid tides and turbulent weather. In August, a 1,100-foot access trestle was badly damaged after a cargo vessel collided with it in fog, while the trestle was twice severely damaged again by storms before the end of the year. Workers also had to brave the deep waters of the strait to blast through the seabed and establish the bridge’s earthquake-proof foundations. A quake in 1935 caused the unfinished south tower to sway ominously – with several men trapped atop it.

Think your job’s hard?

1935 also saw the 'spinning' of the bridge’s main cables. A US Coast Guard vessel helped drag the first wires across the strait, where a crane was waiting to lift them into the 150-tonne cable cradles at the top of each tower. A work platform was then set up halfway between the towers and lengths of wire were painstakingly passed back and forth across the bay, with the men at the top of each tower spending months being lashed by brutal wind. These bundles of wires were steadily tightened at each end, eventually forming the bridge's two main cables.

Concrete and cables

To help safeguard the Golden Gate Bridge against earthquakes and winds of up to 100 miles per hour, nearly 10.5 million cubic feet of concrete was used in its construction – that’s enough to pave a five-foot-wide sidewalk from San Francisco to New York. In each of the bridge’s main cables, there are 27,572 individual wires which, if combined, could wrap around the entire planet three times over with wire to spare.

Construction was much safer than it could have been

At the time, the expected fatality rate among construction workers on large projects was roughly one for every $1 million spent. But Joseph Strauss insisted that workers wear hard hats – it was the first American construction site to make this a requirement – and installed an innovative safety net (pictured) below the bridge.

The project claimed significantly fewer lives than average, and 19 men were saved from death by the net. Known as the 'Halfway to Hell Club,' they became local celebrities. A total of 11 laborers died – 10 in a single incident on February 17, 1937 when 10 tons of timber fell through the net, taking the 10 men down too.

The bridge is completed

After four arduous years, the Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrians on May 27, 1937 (pictured), with as many as 200,000 people crossing it over the course of the day. People competed to be the first to run, roller-skate, walk on stilts and push a pram across the bridge.

The following day, President Franklin D Roosevelt announced via telegraph that the bridge was open to traffic, with a 50-cent toll each way. Thus, one of America’s – and the world’s – greatest engineering marvels was born.

The Golden Gate Bridge in numbers

The bridge spans 1.7 miles from approach to approach, and towers 500 feet above the roadway and 746 feet above the strait. Not counting the concrete anchorages, it weighs 840m lbs – heavier than the Empire State Building – and contains more than 1.2 million steel rivets.

It was the longest suspension bridge in the world on completion, beating another American record holder, New York’s George Washington Bridge. NYC’s Verrazano-Narrows Bridge stole its crown in 1964.

Its fog horns really put a shift in

The Golden Gate Bridge's striking color helps it stand out against San Francisco Bay’s swirling fog, but it's also fitted with five fog horns that have helped herd hundreds of thousands of passing ships to safety over the years. The horns operate for around two-and-a-half hours a day on average, though they can blare for five hours a day or more during summer, when the fog tends to be at its thickest. All five of the bridge's horns sound at different frequencies.

It took 30 years to remove toxic paint from the bridge

The Golden Gate Bridge’s original 1930s paint job was, by weight, two-thirds lead. The architects used a lead-based primer to protect the steel skeleton from corrosion, but they later learned that the paint was harmful to humans and the environment. So, between 1965 and 1995, all the lead paint was meticulously stripped from the bridge and replaced with a zinc-based primer. Zinc is a so-called 'sacrificial metal' that protects the steel from rust-causing water and oxygen.

Maintaining the bridge is an endless task

Contrary to popular myth, the bridge is not periodically repainted from end to end. Instead, a team including 13 ironworkers and 28 painters are continuously touching up the structure to keep its coat looking tip-top and stave off the salty water of the strait. This process, paused only on rainy days, requires a steady hand when operating the spray-paint gun, as fierce winds can blow the jet off at a 90-degree angle.

The paint, mixed according to a custom formula, is stored in a bunker near the bridge – 5,000 to 10,000 gallons are used annually.

The bridge after dark

The bridge’s lighting scheme was devised by consulting architect Irving Morrow. He wanted to vary the intensity of lighting on different parts of the bridge to avoid it looking too artificial. The towers, for example, were to be less brightly lit at the top than at the bottom, so that the enormous structures would seem almost to disappear into the night (though an aircraft beacon tops each one for safety purposes).

There are eight lights on each of the bridge’s main cables, 128 lampposts lining the roadway and 24 sidewalk-level lights.

The bridge was flattened on its 50th anniversary

To celebrate 50 years since the Golden Gate Bridge opened to pedestrians, a recreation of the 1937 walk-over day was staged on May 24, 1987. Traffic was stopped and an estimated 300,000 people descended on the roadway with flags, banners and balloons. But the weight of the crowds caused the bridge to groan and sway, sagging by seven feet in the middle.

This temporarily flattened the bridge’s arch and brought an abrupt halt to the walk-over, though engineers said that the structure was built to bend and was never at risk of collapse.

It survived the Loma Prieta quake of 1989

On October 17, 1989, a 6.9-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area. It was one of the most destructive quakes to ever hit a densely-populated area of the United States, killing 67 people and causing billions of dollars of damage. Part of the Bay Bridge’s upper level collapsed, resulting in one fatality, but the Golden Gate Bridge emerged unscathed. Following a series of reports in the aftermath of the earthquake, the bridge is now mid-way through an expensive seismic retrofit program.

The bridge today

On February 22 ,1985, the one billionth driver to cross the Golden Gate Bridge was gifted a case of Champagne and a bridge-construction hard hat. Now more than two billion vehicles have paid the toll to cross – which has increased somewhat since the $1 round-trips of 1937.

Today it's among the most photographed bridges in the world and visitors can stop by the National Park Service Welcome Center on the bridge’s south side to learn more about the bridge and see a statue of Joseph Strauss.

It was one of the seven civil engineering wonders of America

The American Society of Civil Engineers named the bridge one of Seven Civil Engineering Wonders of the United States in 1994. This put the bridge alongside the Hoover Dam, the Interstate Highway System, the Kennedy Space Center, the Panama Canal, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, and the towers of the World Trade Center.

To help it keep up with the times, the Golden Gate Bridge’s suspension ropes were completely replaced in the 1970s, while a new, more lightweight steel deck was fitted in the 1980s.

It has a Lisbon lookalike

The Ponte 25 de Abril (pictured) stands over the Tagus river connecting the Portuguese capital with the neighboring city of Almada. The Golden Gate Bridge is one of the longest suspension bridges in America, and the Ponte 25 de Abril is one of the longest in Europe. While the two bridges are both painted international orange and are often referred to as doppelgangers, Ponte 25 de Abril is actually more structurally similar to another San Franciscan bridge, the Bay Bridge.

The bridge has starred in many films

The Golden Gate Bridge is no stranger to the silver screen. One famous early film appearance was in 1955 monster flick It Came From Beneath the Sea, with a famous scene involving a tentacled sea creature destroying the landmark. Three years later, the bridge provided the backdrop to this iconic scene from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak.

It has also shown up in the X-Men film series and the Roger Moore-era James Bond classic, A View to a Kill.

Musical duets have been recorded with the bridge

An unusual phenomenon began in 2020 after the Golden Gate Bridge was fitted with new railings along one of its sidewalks. The bridge appeared to 'sing' – the result of winds whistling through the new railings at a specific angle and speed. The ethereal sound confused, aggravated and amused Californians – and even inspired one to record an album with the noise.

Los Angeles musician Nate Mercereau released four 'duets' with the bridge in July 2021, incorporating its unique hum as a backing track.

It has become a stage for protests

The Golden Gate Bridge is frequently used as a platform for rallies and demos. Throughout its history, people have chained themselves to the bridge, climbed its cables and marched along its roadway to make statements about causes they feel strongly about. In November 1996, Hollywood actor Woody Harrelson was one of nine individuals arrested for scaling the bridge in protest against the logging of ancient redwoods. During the Black Lives Matter marches of 2020 (pictured), over 15,000 activists took to the bridge.

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